---
title: "Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases (1993)"
description: "Hirschberg and Litman study how listeners and readers tell apart the two roles of cue phrases such… 40 references, cited by 64 papers here."
authors: ["Julia Hirschberg", "Diane Litman"]
year: 1993
venue: "Computational Linguistics"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/J93-3003/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hirschberg-1993-empirical-studies-disambiguation-cue-phrases/"
---
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# Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases

**Authors:** [Julia Hirschberg](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/julia-hirschberg/) and [Diane Litman](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/diane-litman/) · **Year:** 1993 · **Venue:** [Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/) ([Computational Linguistics 1993](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/cl/1993/)) · **Publisher:** [The MIT Press](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/the-mit-press/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/J93-3003/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/J93-3003.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1730134856)

**Citations:** 366 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [64](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hirschberg-1993-empirical-studies-disambiguation-cue-phrases/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Hirschberg and Litman study how listeners and readers tell apart the two roles of cue phrases such as *now*, *well*, *say* or *incidentally*. These words can signal discourse structure, for example a topic shift or a digression, or they can act as ordinary sentential elements like temporal adverbs. Earlier systems mostly assumed that discourse uses come clause-initially. The authors show that this assumption is unreliable.

They used two recorded and transcribed corpora:
- **HG82**, a multi-speaker radio call-in show, used for an initial study of *now* and *well*;
- **RJB86**, a 75-minute keynote talk by Ronald Brachman, in which every cue phrase was analysed.

They coded prosodic features using Pierrehumbert's intonation framework, along with text-based cues. Discourse uses turned out to be predictable from intonational phrasing and pitch accent, which the authors capture in a small set of prosodic models. Orthography and part of speech serve as text-side predictors. The work matters because it shows that cue phrase disambiguation is feasible, which supports discourse theories that depend on it. It also has a practical payoff: the findings were built into the Bell Labs Text-to-Speech System.

## Key points
- **Prosodic models:**
  - *Discourse Model A*: the cue phrase forms its own intermediate phrase.
  - *Discourse Model B*: the cue phrase is first in a larger phrase and is either deaccented or carries L*.
  - *Sentential Model A*: the cue phrase is first in phrase and carries H* or a complex accent.
  - *Sentential Model B*: the cue phrase is not first in its phrase.
- **Text cues:** In RJB86, orthographic cues from the transcription correctly separated discourse from sentential uses in 675 of 843 cases (80.1%). Part of speech was weaker, at 561 of 878 (63.9%). Combining the two barely improved on orthography alone, giving 677 of 843 (80.3%).
- **Hard-to-classify tokens:** Annotators could not agree on 75 tokens in RJB86. Of these, 55 (73.3%) fell under Discourse Model B or Sentential Model A, the two models that differ only in accent type. This suggests that accent distinctions are weaker cues than phrasing.
- **Interpretation of the models:** Deaccented discourse cues seem to behave like function words, carrying structure rather than content. An L* accent may mark material that is salient but not meant to enter the speakers' shared beliefs.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Julia Hirschberg and Diane Litman. 1993. Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@article{hirschberg1993empirical,
  title = {{Empirical Studies on the Disambiguation of Cue Phrases}},
  author = {Julia Hirschberg and Diane Litman},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1993},
  doi = {10.7916/d8pv6tgb},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7916/d8pv6tgb}
}
```

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## References

40 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*