Shallow semantic labeling using two-phase feature-enhanced string matching

A two-phase annotation method for semantic labeling in natural language processing is proposed. The dynamic programming approach stresses on a non-exact string matching which takes full advantage of the underlying grammatical structure of the parse trees in a Treebank. The first phase of the labeling is a coarse-grained syntactic parsing which is complementary to a semantic dissimilarities analysis in its latter phase. The approach goes beyond shallow parsing to a deeper level of case role identification, while preserving robustness, without being bogged down into a complete linguistic analysis. The paper presents experimental results for recognizing more than 50 different semantic labels in 10,000 sentences. Results show that the approach improves the labeling, even though with incomplete information. Detailed evaluations are discussed in order to justify its significances. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.