LINGUIST List 12.879

Wed Mar 28 2001

Confs: Intonation, Grammar, Spoken Lang Processing

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Dragomir Radev, April 06, Computation, Language, and Information Seminar: Mark Steedman, U. Edinburgh

Dear Colleagues,

The fifth talk of the Computation, Language, and Information seminar
will be held on Friday, April 6. 

	========================================================================
		 The Computation, Language, and Information seminar
	 joint event with the Linguistics Colloquium
	
	
		 Intonation, Grammar, and Spoken Language Processing
	
			 Professor Mark Steedman
			 ICCS Division of Informatics
			 University of Edinburgh
			 http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~steedman
	
				Friday, April 6, 2001
				 4:00 PM
			 2011 MLB (Modern Languages Building)
	
	
	Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is a theory in which lexical
	words and derived constituents of natural language have directional
	functional types---hence the term "Categorial"---and in which the
	grammatical operations which build derivations are strictly
	type-driven, rather than structure-driven---hence "Combinatory".
	Under such a theory, the linguistic notion of "constituent" is
	considerably generalized: most (but not all) contiguous substrings of
	a sentence are typable constituents, and all typable constituents have
	a compositionally assembled semantic interpretation. Important
	advantages ensue for analyzing various problematic phenomena of
	coordination, intonation structure, and incremental processing.
	
	This talk concentrates on its application to intonation structure in
	spoken language processing. Intonation in English is used to convey
	the distinction within an utterance between the part that corresponds
	to question, topic or theme that can be assumed to be mutually agreed
	by the participants, and another part that is the speaker's novel
	contribution on that that topic. Controlling intonation correctly is
	crucial to any kind of interactive spoken dialog, and has hitherto
	proved problematic. Several examples drawn from real human computer
	interactive applications will be given to show the practical
	importance of this problem. An analysis will be offered in terms of
	CCG and a number of applications in progress will be demonstrated.
	
	========================================================================
	
	The Web page for the seminar is http://www.si.umich.edu/~radev/cli-seminar/