https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/022/158/Pea...
If you ordered "butter, peanuts" for example, it would probably get that it was two items even without the pause between words.
It's all about the prior probabilities.
I'm not a linguist or anything, but it seems like in practice people may pronounce "peanut butter" a little differently when they say the two words together. Something like "peanubutter". Or maybe they convert the "t" in "peanut" into a glottal stop.
Anyway, if the "t" is absent when you're talking about peanut butter but present when you're talking about two separate items, I don't see why you shouldn't feel free to use that signal. But I also don't see why you shouldn't use probabilities as well.
If I were to say 'peanut' <pause> 'butter' my interlocutor would probably interrupt me to ask for confirmation because that would be enough to create doubt.
'Peanut' and 'butter' are two unrelated words and it is the absence of pause that creates a pseudo single word.
Pauses are extremely important in spoken language and should be exploited.
I'm on the parent's side on this. "Peanut butter" is such a common item that if someone were to pause in between the words I would assume they just got distracted for some reason. In the context of a shopping list, "peanut" singular just doesn't make sense.
A better example would be something like "yogurt ice cream" which is technically incorrect but it's still something people might say. In that case, I'd expect a shorter pause than in the case of yogurt, ice cream. However, if you were dictating a list to me I'd probably ask for confirmation in either case because there's enough ambiguity.
Domain knowledge around the intent (making a shopping list) and around language conventions helps a lot, not only for NLU, but also for NLS.
But even without a huge NLU dictionary, a simple MC or CRF segmentation model would work. As said earlier, almost no one says., “Add peanut to the shopping list.” They say, “Add peanuts”, of if they’re very atypical, “Add a peanut”. A bare “peanut” is simply unlikely.
I imagine lists with post-specifiers are near impossible to parse too:
Coffee, instant
Custard, powdered
Sugar
Yeah, I should just look it up ...