Referent tracking in restricted texts using a lemmatized lexicon: implications for generation of prosody

An algorithm for referent tracking in a restricted domain is described which allows one to preprocess a text and automatically tag words as either contextually ‘New’ or ‘Given’. The algorithm presupposes computational modelling of lexical semantic identity of sense relations as well as information on inflexional/derivational morphology and compounding. This information is available in a lemmatized lexicon of Swedish. Referent identity is defined on head-word representations derived from the text input on the basis of the inflexional expansion rules contained in the lexicon. Information on the New/Given status of words can subsequently be used in the F0 -generating component of the text-to-speech system to trigger the assignment of focal vs non-focal word accents.