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<Paper uid="C00-2125">
  <Title>Modelling Speech Repairs in German and Mandarin Chinese Spoken Dialogues</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
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Abstract
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    <Paragraph position="0"> Results presented in this paper strongly support the notion that similarities as well as differences in language systems can be empirically investigated by looking into the linguistic patterns of speech repairs in real speech data. A total of 500 Gemmn and 325 Mandarin Chinese overt immediate speech repairs were analysed with regard to their internal phrasal structures, with particular focus on the syntactic and morphological characteristics. Computational models in the form of finite state automata (FSA) also illustrate the describable regularity of German and Mandarin Chinese speech repairs in a formal way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Introduction Spontaneous speech analysis has recently been playing a crucial role in providing empirical evidence for applications in both theoretical and applied fields of computational linguistics. For the purpose of constructing more salient and robust dialogue systems, recent analyses on speech repairs, or more generally speaking, on speech disfluencies in spoken dialogues have tried to explore the distributional characteristics of irregular sequences in order to develop annotation systems to cope with speech repairs (Heeman and Allen 1999, Nakatani and Hirschberg 1994). This new research direction, nevertheless, has until recently merely focused on the surface structure of speech repairs on the one hand. On the other hand, except for very few ilwestigations starting to deal with speech repairs across several languages (Eklund and Shribcrg 1998), most of the studies on speech repairs have investigated only single languages. In addition, studies have shown that syntactic and prosodic features of spontaneous speech data provide empirical evidence with regard to reflecting the speaking habits of speakers, and also help to develop better parsing strategies and natural language processing systems (Heeman and Allen 1999, Hindle 1983). These systems should understand and react to the language use of human users (Lickley and Bard 1998, Tseng 1998).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper presents results of a comparative stud), of speech repairs with the goal of examining and modelling repair syntax by looking into empirical cross-linguistic spccch data. In this paper, the phenomena of speech repairs are introduced first, followed by an empirical cross-linguistic analysis of speech repairs in German and Mandarin Chinese, which have different language typologies. Speech data, therefore, were collected to look for linguistic sequences and particularities of spontaneous speech, which usually cause difficulties for language dialogue systems. Syntactic patterns found in the comparative analysis have subsequently been formalised to make clear the internal structures of speech repairs. Formal modelling in FSA should finally show the fonnal characteristics of repair sequences in these two language systems.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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