Influence of dependency parsing on the prosody of Chinese discourse

Dependency parsing has been a prime focus of Natural Language Processing. The present paper was attempting to elucidate the relationship between prosodic variation and syntactic structure within the framework of dependency parsing. The study adopted Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) dependency parsing tool to annotate Chinese spoken discourse corpus. Duration variation and stress distribution patterns were employed as parameters to examine the interactions of the syntactic structures and the prosodic features. Preliminary results demonstrated that there was an intrinsic association between duration variation and dependency relation. Specifically, governor duration was more likely to be longer than dependent duration of dependency relations of Left- Adjunct, Mood-Tense, Attribute, Quantity and so on. Moreover, in “DE” Construction, Preposition-Object and Verb-Object, the dependent duration was much longer.