Hirschberg, JuliaGrosz, Barbara2009-02-051992Hirschberg, Julia and Barbara J. Grosz. 1992. Intonational features of local and global discourse structure. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Speech and Natural Language, February 23-26, 1992, Harriman, New York, ed. ACM International Conference on Human Language Technology Research, 441-446. Morristown, NJ: Association for Computational Linguistics.http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2562374We present results of a study of the relationship between intonational features including pitch range, timing, and amplitude and aspects of discourse structure defined in terms of Grosz and Sidner's (1986) model of discourse. We compare structural labelings of AP news text with prosodic/acoustic features examined from recordings of the same text read by a professional newscaster. We find significant correlations between prosodic/acoustic characteristics and both local and global aspects of discourse structure identified by our labelers. Our results have applications for speech synthesis and, potentially, for speech recognition.10.3115/1075527.1075632