Constraint-Based Phonological Parsing: An Event-Based Approach

Abstract

In contrast to Chapter 6, which was primarily concerned with a segmental approach to phonological parsing, this chapter is concerned with a nonsegmental approach to spoken language processing based on the declarative aspects of the event-based approach to phonological description which have been the main theme of this book. The task of this chapter is to present the procedural aspects and in particular an operational semantics for an event-based parser for application in a spoken language recognition system. Furthermore, in order to develop a parser suitable for spoken language recognition a number of issues other than those discussed in the previous chapters must be considered, in particular the notions of incrementality and questions of system architecture in general. Section 7.1 is concerned with processing problems in spoken language recognition which distinguishes it from written language recognition. Section 7.2 introduces the notion of event parsing. In Sections 7.3 and 7.4, the operational semantics for the event-based phonological parser are introduced. In Section 7.5, spoken language recognition system architecture is discussed.