Abstract
This paper presents research that investigates the effect of prosodic phrasing on syntactic parsing. The focus is on the ambiguity of a modifier (relative clause or adjective phrase) in relation to the two nouns in a complex noun phrase in Arabic. Ambiguity resolution tendencies for this construction differ across languages. These effects have been shown to occur even in silent reading, so the suggestion is that the parser projects onto a text a default prosodic phrasing which then influences the final syntactic parse and semantic analysis of the sentence. The structure of Arabic permits use of a method for tapping into implicit prosodic boundaries. Liaison, a phonological process occurring across word boundaries, is sensitive to patterns of prosodic chunking in Arabic. These liaison phenomena make the phonological phrasing of Arabic sentences easy to detect in listening. But also, they are indicated by diacritics in the ‘vowelized’ version of Arabic orthography which simulates the overt prosody. Implications for the use of this method in text/speech syntactic annotation, tree banking, and semantic analysis is discussed as well as implications for building an interface ontology that characterizes the principled interaction of a prosodic and syntactic derivation in sentence parsing.
Hala Abdelghany. (2014) Prosodic Phrasing and the Parsing of Modifier Attachment Ambiguity in Deep and Shallow Orthography, Conference on Language and Technology 2014.
-
Viewed
1538 -
Downloads
0
Publisher
Center for Language Engineering
Country
Pakistan
City
Karachi
From
13-11-2014
To
15-11-2014