Digital Humanities 2010 1 Non-traditional Prosodic Features for Automated Phrase-Break Prediction

The goal of automatic phrase break prediction is to emulate human performance in terms of naturalness and intelligibility when assigning prosodic-syntactic boundaries to input text. Techniques can be deterministic or probabilistic; in either case, the problem is treated as a classification task and outputs from the model are evaluated against 'gold standard ' phrase break annotations in the reference dataset or corpus. These annotations may represent intentions (of the speaker or writer) or perceptions (of the listener or reader) about alternating chunks and boundaries in the speech stream or in text, where the chunking bears some relationship to syntactic phras