7. A system as in claim 6 wherein the highest level POS tags in a multi-level hierarchy of such tags comprise tags corresponding to the categories noun-related, verb-related, noun-modifiers and verb-modifiers respectively.
6. A processor-based system for processing spoken language comprising: a speech recognition unit of the processor-based system configured to execute program code to convert spoken words into a text word sequence; a part-of-speech (POS) tagger of the processor-based system configured to execute program code to tag words in the text word sequence with part-of-speech tags; a disfluence identifier of the processor-based system configured to execute program code to tag edited words in the text word sequence with a feature set created with techniques comprising, matching only the highest level POS tags in a multi-level hierarchy of such tags; a parser for parsing the text word sequence into machine instructions with the aid of POS-tag and edited-word-tag information; and modifying a conventional definition of a rough copy by allowing single mismatching in POS-tag sequences of rough copy, wherein the conventional definition of rough copy in a string of tagged words has the form of ∂ 1 βλ∂ 2 , where, ∂ 1 (the source) and ∂ 2 (the copy) both begin with non-punctuation; the strings of non-punctuation POS tags of ∂ 1 and ∂ 2 are identical; β (the free final) consists of zero or more sequences of a free final word (see below) followed by optional punctuation; and interregnum “λ” consists of sequences of an interregnum string followed by optional punctuation.