Frederick J. Damerau

Automatic parsing for content analysis

Although automatic syntactic and semantic analysis is not yet possible for all of an unrestricted natural language text, some applications, of which content analysis is one, do not have such a stringent coverage requirement. Preliminary studies show that the Harvard Syntactic Analyzer can produce correct and unambiguous identification of the subject and object of certain verbs for approximately half of the relevant occurences. This provides a degree of coverage for content analysis variables which compares favorably to manual methods, in which only a sample of the total available text is normally processed.