Japanese Dependency Structure Analysis Using Information about Multiple Pauses and F0

Abstract

Syntax and prosody are closely related to each other. This paper is concerned with the problem of exploiting pause information for recovering dependency structures of read Japanese sentences. Our parser can handle both symbolic information such as dependency rule and numerical information such as the probability of dependency distance of a phrase in a unified way as linguistic information. In our past work, post-phrase pause that immediately succeeds a phrase in question was employed as prosodic information. In this paper, we employed two kinds of pauses in addition to the post-phrase pause: post-post-phrase pause that immediately succeeds the phrase that follows a phrase in question, and pre-phrase pause that immediately precedes a phrase in question. By combining the three kinds of pause information linearly with the optimal combination weights that were determined experimentally, the parsing accuracy was improved compared to the case where only the post-phrase pause was used as in our previous work. Linear combination of pause and fundamental frequency information yielded further improvement of parsing accuracy.