2. A method as in claim 1 wherein the disfluence identifier operates with a feature set created with techniques further comprising including distance to next identical orthographic word as a conditioning variable.
1. A computer-implemented method for processing spoken language comprising: converting spoken words into a text word sequence in a processor-based natural language processing system executing program code; tagging words in the text word sequence with part-of-speech (POS) tags through a part-of-speech tagger component of the system; and tagging edited words in the text word sequence using a disfluence identifier component of the system that operates with a feature set created with techniques comprising: matching only the highest level POS tags in a multi-level hierarchy of such tags, wherein the highest level of the hierarchy comprises categories of tags including a noun category, a verb category, an adjective category, and an adverb category; processing a resulting sequence of word-POS-tag pairs to mark each word in a text sequence with an edited-word-tag; removing sequence-related errors in edited-word-tag information before parsing the text word sequence; parsing the text word sequence into machine instructions with the aid of POS-tag and edited-word-tag information; and allowing single mismatches in POS-tag sequences of rough copy, wherein rough copy in a string of POS-tagged words produces candidates for any potential pairs of reparanda and repairs by applying an algorithm to the string of POS-tagged words.