Speech Intention Understanding in a Head-final Language: A Disambiguation Utilizing Intonation-dependency
This work addresses the challenge of accurately interpreting speaker intentions in spoken language processing for head-final languages, which is incremental as it builds on existing methods by incorporating acoustic cues.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding speech intention in head-final languages like Korean, where semantic and syntactic cues are insufficient, by proposing a classification system that uses intonation-dependency to distinguish between fragments, statements, questions, commands, and rhetorical forms, and validates its utility with test sentences.
For a large portion of real-life utterances, the intention cannot be solely decided by either their semantic or syntactic characteristics. Although not all the sociolinguistic and pragmatic information can be digitized, at least phonetic features are indispensable in understanding the spoken language. Especially in head-final languages such as Korean, sentence-final prosody has great importance in identifying the speaker's intention. This paper suggests a system which identifies the inherent intention of a spoken utterance given its transcript, in some cases using auxiliary acoustic features. The main point here is a separate distinction for cases where discrimination of intention requires an acoustic cue. Thus, the proposed classification system decides whether the given utterance is a fragment, statement, question, command, or a rhetorical question/command, utilizing the intonation-dependency coming from the head-finality. Based on an intuitive understanding of the Korean language that is engaged in the data annotation, we construct a network which identifies the intention of a speech, and validate its utility with the test sentences. The system, if combined with up-to-date speech recognizers, is expected to be flexibly inserted into various language understanding modules.