An integrated approach to text understanding

Top-down analysis (prediction-based) and bottom-up analysis (syntax and semantics-based) are two typical approaches to text understanding; however, each has its drawbacks. The authors give a novel approach to Chinese text understanding. With the approach, the top-down analyzer (TA) consisting of a predictor and a substantiator is combined with the bottom-up analyzer (BA) which is made up of a syntactic analyzer and an intersentence relation analyzer through cooperation and result synthesis. In text understanding, TA sends predictions to guide BA´s bottom-up analysis, and the result synthesizer unites TA´s and BA´s results into a more complete and detailed result if they are consistent. This approach has been implemented on a distributed knowledge-based system. The preliminary experiments showed that the integrated approach may give a more complete and detailed result than the top-down or bottom-up approaches