A Syntactic Framework for Speech Repairs and Other Disruptions

Mark G. Core, Lenhart K. Schubert

Abstract: This paper presents a grammatical and processing framework for handling the repairs, hesitations, and other interruptions in natural human dialog. The proposed framework has proved adequate for a collection of human-human task-oriented dialogs, both in a full manual examination of the corpus, and in tests with a parser capable of parsing some of that corpus. This parser can also correct a pre-parser speech repair identifier resulting in a 4.8% increase in recall.