Structural Dependencies between Syntactic Relations: A Robust Parsing Model for Extrapositions in Spontaneous Speech

Typical grammatical constructions in spontaneous German speech are extrapositions which are discontinuous constructions where constituents occur in the Nachfeld. Structural dependencies between the source sentence and the extraposed constituent are claimed to govern all interpretations induced by extraposed constituents to the source sentence. The model proceeds recursively by integrating the extraposed constituent in the source sentence due to the syntactic relations between reference and extraposed constituent. The parsing strategy is robust to out-of-vocabulary words, to speech recognition errors by morphologically similar words and to some kinds of deletions.