<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C96-1014">
  <Title>Integrating Syntactic and Prosodic Information for the Efficient Detection of Empty Categories</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we describe how syntactic and prosodic information interact in a translation module for spoken utterances which tries to meet the two - often conflicting - main objectives, the implementation of theoretically sound solutions and efficient processing of tile solutions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> As an analysis which meets the first criterion but seemingly fails to meet the second one, we take an analysis of the German clause which relies on traces in verbal head positions in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (llt'sG, cf. (Pollard&amp;Sag, 1994)). The methods described in this paper have been implemented as part of the IBM-SynSem..</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Module and the FAU-Erlangen/LMU-Munich-Prosody-Module in the MT project Vl,;ltHMOmI, (of. (Wahlster, 1993)) where spontaneously spoken utterances in a negotiation dialogue are translated. In this system, an lh's(~ is processed by a bottom-up chart parser that takes word lattices as tThis work was partiMly funded by the Gc,-Imtn Vedcral Ministry for Research and Technology (BMIW) in the framework of the Verbmobil Project under (~r~nt ~(11 IV 101 V (Verbmobil). Tim rt:sponslbility for the contents of this study lies with the aa,thors. null its input. The output of the parser is the semantic representation for the best string hypothesis in the lattice.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> It is our main result that prosodic information can be employed in such a system to determine possible locations for empty elements in tile input. Rather than treating prosodic information as virtual input items which have to match an appropriate category in tile grammar rules (Bear&amp;Price, 1990), or which by virtue of being 'unknown' in the grammar force the parser to close off the current phrase (Marcus&amp;Hindle, 1990), our parser employs prosodic information as affecting the postulation of empty elements.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>