Parsing and Disfluency Placement
It has been suggested that some forms of speech disfluencies, most notable interjections and parentheticals, tend to occur disproportionally at major clause boundaries [6] and thus might serve to aid parsers in establishing these boundaries. We have tested a current statistical parser [1] on Switchboard text with and without interjections and parentheticals and found that the parser performed better when not faced with these extra phenomena. This suggest that for current parsers, at least, interjection and parenthetical placement does not help in the parsing process.