Making understanders out of parsers: Semantically driven parsing as a key concept for realistic text understanding applications

  • Authors:
  • Udo Hahn

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Passau, Box 2540, D-8390 Passau, Federal Republic of Germany

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Intelligent Systems
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Semantically driven natural language parsers have found wide-spread application as a text processing methodology for knowledge-based information retrieval systems. It is argued that this parsing technique particularly corresponds to the requirements inherent to large-scale text analysis. Unfortunately, this approach suffers from several shortcomings which demand a thorough reformulation of its paradigm. Incorporating principles from conceptual analysis and word expert parsing in a model of lexically distributed text parsing, the focus of the modifications proposed in this article, is on a clean declarative separation of linguistio and other knowledge representation levels, abstraction mechanisms leading to a small collection of specification primitives for the parser, and an attempt to incorporate linguistic generalizations and modularization principles into the design of a semantic text grammar. A sample parse illustrates the operation and linguistic coverage of a lexically distributed text parser based on these theoretical considerations with respect to the semantic analysis of noun groups, simple assertional sentences, nominal anaphora, and textual ellipsis. © 1989 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.