ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1989
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1989

Parsing spoken utterances in an inflectional language

M. Prakash, G. V. Ramana Rao, C. Chandra Sekhar, B. Yegnanarayana

This paper proposes a new approach to parse spoken utterances suitable for inflectional languages such as Hindi. This approach exploits a lot of redundant syntactic and semantic information present in the inflections. In this approach, parsing is done at three levels: phrase level, clause level and sentence level. This is because each level requires a different parsing strategy. Phrase level parsing uses both the case frame approach and the pattern matching approach. Therefore it has the directional freedom and the ability to focus upon the case markers as in the case frame approach and the robustness of the pattern matcher in the neighbourhood of a case marker. Clause level parsing allows the free occurrence of certain phrases within a clause. Sentence level parsing uses a simple pattern matching technique. The spurious and missing case markers are treated specially using metaknowledge.