ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007

Exploiting prosody for PCFGs with latent annotations

Markus Dreyer, Izhak Shafran

We propose novel methods for integrating prosody in syntax using generative models. By adopting a grammar whose constituents have latent annotations, the influence of prosody on syntax can be learned from data. In one method, prosody is utilized to seed the latent annotations of a grammar which is then refined using EM iterations. In an orthogonal approach, we integrate prosody into grammar more explicitly using a model that jointly observes words and associated prosody. We evaluate the two methods by parsing speech data from the Switchboard corpus. The results are compared against baseline results from a model that does not use prosody. The experiments show that prosody improves a grammar in terms of accuracy as well as the parsimonious use of parameters.