Pattern Matching in a Linguistically-Motivated Text Understanding System

An ongoing debate in text understanding efforts centers on the use of pattern-matching techniques, which some have characterized as "designed to ignore as much text as possible," versus approaches which primarily employ rules that are domain-independent and linguisticaUy-motivated. For instance, in the message-processing community, there has been a noticeable pulling back from largecoverage grammars to the point where, in some systems, traditional models of syntax and semantics have been completely replaced by domain-specific finite-state approximations. In this paper we report on a hybrid approach which uses such domain-specific patterns as a supplement to domain-independent grammar rules, domain-independent semantic rules, and automatically hypothesized domain-specific semantic rules. The surprising result, as measured on TIPSTER test data, is that domain-specific pattern matching improved performance, but only slightly, over more general linguistically-motivatedtechniques...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: NAACL
• Authors: Damaris M. Ayuso
• Keywords: Domain-specific Finite-state Approximations, Domain-specific Pattern, Domain-specific Semantic Rules, NAACL 1994, NAACL 2007