Parser Meta Rules

for speech repairs and other disruptions in phrase structure

Mark Core

Note, the examples on the Levelt slide and the speech repair notation come from the University of Rochester Ph.D. thesis of Peter Heeman. Peter's page is here.

Also the note the page of E. Shriberg.

Speech Repairs

  • Restarts of an utterance (Fresh Starts)

    Ex. I need to send let's see how many boxcars can one engine take

  • Changes or repetitions made mid-utterance (Modification Repairs)

    Ex. you can carry them both on tow both on the same engine

  • Hesitations (Abridged Repairs)

    Ex. we need to um manage to get the bananas to Dansville more quickly

    Anatomy of a Speech Repair

    I need to send   let's see    how many boxcars can one engine take
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^^^^^^^^^    ^^^^
reparandum     | editing terms alteration
               |
     interruption point

you can carry them both on   tow both on the same engine
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
            reparandum     |  alteration
                       interruption point

    How a Parser Can Handle Repairs

  • Allow constituents to "jump" over reparandum and editing terms
  • Restart parser

    Levelt

  • Levelt's coordinate structure test for repairs:

    Ex. take E1 to Elmi- uh E2 to Avon

  • Is valid because take E1 to Elmira and E2 to Avon is acceptable

  • Doesn't work for discourse markers:

    Ex. So the train needs um so the tanker should be in Corning

    Finding and Handling Repairs

    [Hindle 83] searched for repeated constituents

    [Bear et al. 92] used parser failure as signal of a repair

    [Nakatani and Hirschberg 93] use acoustic cues

    [Heeman and Allen 97] combine various sources of context (silences, syntactic information, boundary tones)

    [Kikui and Morimoto 94] also use syntactic information

    Note, for more information see this paper. In my talk, I go into more detail about these papers as this slide just lists points of interest.