A friendly merger of conceptual expectations and linguistic analysis in a text processing system

The SCISOR system is a computer program designed to scan naturally occurring texts in constrained domains, extract information, and answer questions about that information. The system currently reads newspaper stories in the domain of corporate mergers and acquisitions. The language analysis strategy used by SCISOR combines full syntactic (bottom-up) parsing and conceptual expectation-driven (top-down) parsing. Four knowledge sources, including syntactic and semantic information and domain knowledge, interact in a flexible manner. This integration produces a more robust semantic analyzer designed to deal gracefully with gaps in lexical and syntactic knowledge, transports easily to domains, and facilitates the extraction of information from texts