Julia Hirschberg

Abstract:  tural Language Processing, intonation has commonly been seen as 'the edge of language'. More recently, however, this attitude seems to be changing -- witness the speech session at ACL86, for example. I think much of the reason for this change in NLP arises from the fact that the study of spoken language promises to help overcome critical obs- tacles to progress in better-established areas of the field. 88 1. Speaker Intentions First, prosody provides help in identifying speaker intentions. It is now widely accepted that the contour or tune a speaker employs in an utterance can communicate semantic or pragmatic infor- mation. However, since there are few particular tune types for which we can specify with any con- fidence just what the meaning might be, it has been difficult to generalize about what type of infor- mation tunes in general can convey. But from those whose 'meaning' is better understood -- namely, declarative, yes-ff( 'question, surprise/redundancy, rise-fall-rise, and