Effective use of prosody in parsing conversational speech

We identify a set of prosodic cues for parsing conversational speech and show how such features can be effectively incorporated into a statistical parsing model. On the Switchboard corpus of conversational speech, the system achieves improved parse accuracy over a state-of-the-art system which uses only lexical and syntactic features. Since removal of edit regions is known to improve downstream parse accuracy, we explore alternatives for edit detection and show that PCFGs are not competitive with more specialized techniques.