From speech signal to syntactic structure: A computational implementation

Abstract

This paper presents a new computational implementation bridging several modules of grammar from phonetics to phonology to syntax. The system takes as input a speech signal annotated with syllables, interprets the phonetic data in phonological/prosodic terms, matches the data against a lexicon and makes the results available to a linguistically deep computational grammar. The system is showcased by means of syntactically ambiguous structures in German which can be disambiguated based on prosodic constituency information. A system evaluation with the German data showed good results for this new combination of automatic speech signal analysis and computational grammars, which takes a significant step towards a linguistically fine-grained computational analysis and hence towards real automatic speech understanding.