Finding clauses in unrestricted text by finitary and stochastic methods

The paper presents and compares two different methods of parsing, a regular expression method and a stochastic method, with respect to their success in identifying basic clauses in unrestricted English text. These methods of parsing were developed in order to be applied to the task of improving the detection of large prosodic units in the Bell Labs text-to-speech system, and were so applied experimentally. The paper also discusses the notion of basic clause that was defined as the parsing target. The result of a comparison of the error rates of the two parsing methods in the recognition of basic clauses showed that there was a 13% error rate for the regular expression method and a 6.5% error rate for the stochastic method.