Parsing Overlaps

Overlaps constitute a challenge for any system for linguistic representations in that they cannot be treated as a onedimensional event: in order to take into account the purport of an overlapping stretch of dialogue for the ongoing pragmatics and semantics of discourse, we have devised a new annotation schema which is then fed into the parser and produces a multidimensional nonlinear syntactic constituency representation. This paper will present work carried out on the 60,000 words Italian Spontaneous Speech Corpus called AVIP, under national project API. It will present the linguistic annotation tools used, in particular the parser, to produce syntactic structures of overlapped temporally aligned turns. Then it will concentrate on the syntactic, semantic and prosodic aspects related to this debated issue. The paper will argue in favour of a joint and thus temporally aligned representation of overlapping material to capture all linguistic information made available by the local context. This will result in a syntactically branching node we call OVL which contains both the overlapper’s and the overlappee’s material (linguistic or no-linguistic). An extended classification of the phenomenon has shown that overlaps contributes substantially to the interpretation of the local context rather than the other way around.