Investigating Effect of Rich Syntactic Features on Mandarin Prosodic Boundaries Prediction

摘要

Previous researches indicated that syntactic information could improve the performance of automatic prosodic boundaries prediction. However, few researches focused on the usefulness of various syntactic features on different phrase boundaries prediction in detail, especially the verification on large-scale corpus. This paper investigates the effect of different syntactic feature combinations for phrase boundaries prediction based on a large-scale Mandarin corpus. Syntactic phrase structure and dependency relationship are both introduced and compared in the experiments. The evaluations of all the features in different time-span as well as feature importance are also carried out. The experimental results show that prediction models of prosodic word and prosodic phrase achieve the best performance with syntactic phrase and dependency features, while the models with dependency features outperform other models when predicting intonational phrase. Furthermore, the performance of intonational phrase is improved obviously by concerning syntactic global features. Meanwhile, the experiments also find that the relationship between syntactic local features and lower level prosodic boundaries: prosodic phrase and prosodic word, is closer.