Making Use of Intonation in Interactive Dialogue Translation

Mark Steedman


Abstract
Intonational information is frequently discarded in speech recognition, and assigned by default heuristics in text-to-speech generation. However, in many applications involving dialogue and interactive discourse, intonation conveys significant information, and we ignore it at our peril. Translating telephones and personal assistants are an interesting test case, in which the salience of rapidly shifting discourse topics and the fact that sentences are machine-generated, rather than written by humans, combine to make the application particularly vulnerable to our poor theoretical grasp of intonation and its functions. I will discuss a number of approaches to the problem for such applications, ranging from cheap tricks to a combinatory grammar-based theory of the semantics involved and a syntax-phonology interface for building and generating from interpretations.
Anthology ID:
1997.iwpt-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies
Month:
September 17-20
Year:
1997
Address:
Boston/Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Editors:
Anton Nijholt, Robert C. Berwick, Harry C. Bunt, Bob Carpenter, Eva Hajicova, Mark Johnson, Aravind Joshi, Ronald Kaplan, Martin Kay, Bernard Lang, Alon Lavie, Makoto Nagao, Mark Steedman, Masaru Tomita, K. Vijay-Shanker, David Weir, Kent Wittenburg, Mats Wiren
Venue:
IWPT
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
xix
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/1997.iwpt-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mark Steedman. 1997. Making Use of Intonation in Interactive Dialogue Translation. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, page xix, Boston/Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Making Use of Intonation in Interactive Dialogue Translation (Steedman, IWPT 1997)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/1997.iwpt-1.4.pdf