A Trainable Bracketer for Noun Modifiers

Noun phrases carry much of the information in a text. Systems that attempt to acquire knowledge from text must first decompose complex noun phrases to get access to that information. In the case of noun compounds, this decomposition usually means bracketing the modifiers into nested modifierhead pairs. It is then possible to determine the semantic relationships among individual components of the noun phrase. This paper describes a semi-automatic system for bracketing an unlimited number of adjectival or nominal premodifiers. Since the system is intended to start processing with no prior knowledge, it gets trained as it brackets. That is, it starts from scratch and accumulates bracketing evidence while processing a text under user supervision. Experiments show that generalizations of the structure of complex modifier sequences allow the system to bracket previously unseen compounds correctly. Furthermore, as more compounds are bracketed, the number of bracketing decisions required of th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AI
• Authors: Ken Barker
• Keywords: AI 1998, Artificial Intelligence, Bracketing, Complex Noun Phrases, Noun Phrase