Markov modeling of prosodic phrase structure

A simple computational model for predicting phrase boundaries from text is described. The hierarchical structure of the model is based on linguistic theory, and the model itself is probabilistic. The probabilistic component is important for several reasons: it can capture the fact that the same sequence of words can be produced with a variety of prosodic contours (some more likely than others), it allows for automatic training of the model, and it provides a mechanism for combining a prosodic component with other knowledge sources. Results are presented for the model, trained and evaluated on a database of FM radio news