Syntactic and Semantic Input to Prosodic Markup in CommandTalk

Natural Language Generation in Spoken and Written Dialogue

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The CommandTalk military spoken dialogue system uses Semantic Head-Driven Generation in Gemini grammars, which have compositional semantics, permitting the identification of parse tree nodes corresponding to logical form subexpressions. This method of generation gives the CommandTalk prosody agent access to appropriate syntactic and semantic information to provide markup on generated sentences so that specialized military terms are pronounced correctly and so that general English language constructions important for dialogue can be given appropriate prosody to enhance their intelligibility and effectiveness. Specific military examples are map grid coordinates and unit call signs consisting of strings of letters and digits. The most salient English language construction supported is alternative questions, with contrastive stress on the distinguishing parts of alternatives.