Syntactic phrases

A question that has interested linguists for some time concerns the relationship between syntactic phrases (ie. the syntax tree) and prosodic phrasing. While there is clearly some relationship (easily seen in the above examples), finding the general nature of this is extremely difficult. Factors which complicate the relationship include ... 

Extraction of relations (based on shallow parsing, this annotator identifies syntactic clauses containing noun and verb phrases)... 

A number of more sophisticated deterministic systems have been proposed [26], [186], [10] which make of rules for specific cases. For example, the verb balancing rule of Baehenko and Fitzpatrick [26] works through a sentence left to right and eompares the number of words in a potential phrase formed with the verb and the syntactic constituents to the left, and the number of words in the constituent to the right. The potential phrase with the shortest number of words is chosen as the correct one. 

More recently a number of approaches have been proposed which combine the advantages of decision tree approaches (use of heterogeneous features, robustness to curse of dimensionality) and the HMM approach (statistical, global optimal search of sequences). In addition, there has been somewhat of a re-awakening of use of syntactic features due to the provision of more robust parsers. Rather than attempt an explicit model of prosodic phrasing based on trying to map from the syntax tree, most of these approaches use the syntax information as additional features in a classifier [508], [209], [257]. 

Koehn, R, Abney, S., Hirschberg, J., and Collins, M. Improving intonational phrasing with syntactic information. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing 2000 (2000). 

If a sentence is spoken with little or no affective content, i.e. in a discourse-neutral manner, we still see characteristic patterns in the phrasing, rhythm, pitch, voice quality and timing. Typical effects include phones at the ends of sentences or phrases being lengthened, syntactically salient words (e.g. heads) having more emphasis, FO levels being higher at the starts of sentences and so on. 

Read, I., and Cox, S. Stochastic and syntactic techniques for predicting phrase breaks. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 2005 (2005). 

Syntactically, the patient is now getting beyond the stage when only phrase-words are used. He has recently begun to use phrases containing two elements. 

Chemical databases are not static libraries, archived forever with no interest in retrieval they are intended to be used. It is useful to pose questions about the contents of a database, and to retrieve example structures. These questions are phrased in a chemical language that is syntactically simple, but semantically rich. Usually, this query language is built on top of standard graphical chemical nomenclature, and augmented by features appropriate to the subdomain of chemistry represented in the database. 

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