Identifying Cue Phrases Intonationally

Cue Phrases are words and phrases such as 'okay,' 'now,' 'but,' 'anyway,' 'by the way,' and 'that reminds me,' that may be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. For example, 'anyway' can indi- cate a topic return and 'that reminds me' can signal a digression. The structural information conveyed by cue phrases is crucial to tasks such as pronoun resolution. The incorporation of cue phrases into natural language pro- cessing systems also helps reduce the complexity of discourse processing. However, despite the recognized importance of cue phrases, many questions remain to be examined. In this talk I will report on research addressing the problem of cue phrase identification.