SHALLOW PARSING AND TEXT CHUNKING: A VIEW ON UNDERSPECIFICATION IN SYNTAX

Abstract

This paper illustrates a technique of shallow parsing named “text chunking” whereby “parse incompleteness” is reinterpreted as “parse underspecification”. A text is chunked into structured units which can be identified with certainty on the basis of available knowledge. The chunking process stops at that level of granularity beyond which the analysis gets undecidable. We argue that a chunked syntactic representation can usefully be exploited as such for non trivial NLP applications which do not require full text understanding such as automatic lexical acquisition and information retrieval.