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Measuring syntactic complexity in spontaneous spoken Swedish
Mikael Roll1, Johan Frid, Merle Horne
1Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, Lund University, Sweden. mikael.roll@ling.lu.se
Language and Speech
|August 19, 2007
Summary
Hesitation disfluencies in speech, particularly after the Swedish word "att," are linked to increased syntactic complexity. This finding aids in predicting speech disfluencies based on linguistic structure.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Speech Science
Background:
- Hesitation disfluencies are theorized to indicate cognitive processing of complex linguistic structures.
- Function words, like the Swedish 'att', are crucial in syntactic parsing and may be sites for disfluencies.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the relationship between syntactic complexity and hesitation disfluencies following the Swedish function word 'att'.
- To determine if syntactic complexity can predict the occurrence of disfluencies after 'att'.
Main Methods:
- Syntactic analysis of speech fragments containing 'att' using the GRAMMAL tool to derive complexity measures from tree structures.
- Classification of 'att' instances into disfluent and fluent contexts.
- Application of Bayesian and neural network algorithms to predict disfluency based on complexity.
Main Results:
- Disfluent instances of 'att' were associated with significantly higher mean syntactic complexity values compared to fluent instances.
- Classification algorithms achieved 71% accuracy in predicting disfluency, outperforming a majority class baseline.
Conclusions:
- Syntactic complexity is a significant predictor of hesitation disfluencies after the function word 'att'.
- Computational models can effectively leverage linguistic complexity for disfluency prediction in speech.
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