Prosody, empty categories and parsing - a success story

Abstract

We describe a number of experiments that demonstrate the usefulness of prosodic information for a processing module which parses spoken utterances with a feature-based grammar employing empty categories. We show that by requiring certain prosodic properties from those positions in the input, where the presence of an empty category has to be hypothesized, a derivation can be accomplished more efficiently The approach has been implemented in the machine translation project Verbmobil and results in a signicant reduction of the work-load for the parser.