Structural Methods for Lexical/Semantic Patterns
Scott A. Waterman · 1993
This paper represents initial work on corpus methods for acquiring lexicM/semantic pattern lexicons for text understanding. Recently, implementors of information extraction (IE) systems have moved away from using conventionM syntactic parsing methods, instead adopting a variety of pattern based approaches for complex IE tasks. While there has been much work towards automated acquisition of lexicons for conventional syntactic processing, little progress has been made towards those for pattern systems, due primarily, in the author 's opinion, to a lack of a linguistic framework in which to view their use. In combining a functional view of both denotational semantics and syntactic structure, this paper provides a basis for examining the structural constraints between the two. This functionM viewpoint is the starting point for methods to investigate the characteristics of the interaction between text and denoration, from the perspective of patternbased systems. An approach for determining and exploiting these structural constraints is outlined in terms of building hierarchical lexicM structures for text understanding. Experiment results for such a method are given, demonstrating the functionality of the approach.