Topic parsing: Accounting for text macro structures in full-text analysis

摘要

The rapid proliferation of full-text databases poses serious problems to the natural language processing components of information retrieval systems. Not taking text-level phenomena of written natural language discourse into account causes a marked decrease of performance for many text information system applications. Consequently, appropriate text parsing facilities must be capable of recognizing the rich internal structure of full-texts on lower levels of text connectivity as well as on the global organizational level of text coherence. This paper introduces such a parser which is based on the conceptual knowledge of its domain and is organized as a collection of distributed lexicalized grammar modules (word experts) which communicate through message-passing. Emphasis is put on text grammatical specifications which state formal conditions for recognizing higher-order text constituents and their coherent configuration on the global level of textual macro organization.