Parsing Run Amok: Relation-Driven Control for Text Analysis

Abstract

Traditional syntactic models of parsing have been inadequate for task-driven processing of extended text, because they spend most of their time on misdirected linguistic analysis, leading to problems with both efficiency and coverage. Statistical and domain-driven processing offer compelling possibilities, but only as a complement to syntactic processing. For semanticallyoriented tasks such as data extraction from text, the problem is how to combine the coverage of these weaker methods with the detail and accuracy of traditional lingusitic analysis. A good approach is to focus linguistic analysis on relations that directly impact the semantic results, detaching these relations from the complete constituents to which they belong. This approach results in a faster, more robust, and potentially more accurate parser for real text.