Description: Syntactic parsing is one of the best understood language processing applications. Since language and grammar have been formally defined, it is easy for computers to parse the syntactic structure of natural language text. Does meaning have structure as well? If it has, how can we analyze the structure? Previous systems rely on a one-to-one correspondence between syntactic rules and semantic rules. But such systems can only be applied to limited fragments of English. In this thesis, we propose a general-purpose shallow semantic parser which utilizes a semantic network (WordNet), and a frame dataset (FrameNet). Semantic relations recognized by the parser are based on how human beings represent knowledge of the world. Parsing semantic structure allows semantic units and constituents to be accessed and processed in a more meaningful way than syntactic parsing, moving the automation of understanding natural language text to a higher level.

Description: This paper describes the authors' work in integrating three different lexical resources: FrameNet, VerbNet, and WordNet, into a unified, richer knowledge-base, to the end of enabling more robust semantic parsing. The construction of each of these lexical resources has required many years of laborious human effort, and they all have their strengths and shortcomings. By linking them together, the authors build an improved resource in which (1) the coverage of FrameNet is extended, (2) the VerbNet lexicon is augmented with frame semantics, and (3) selectional restrictions are implemented using WordNet semantic classes. The synergistic exploitation of various lexical resources is crucial for many complex language processing applications, and the authors prove it once again effective in building a robust semantic parser.