We present an annotated corpus of English cooking recipe procedures, and describe and evaluate computational methods for learning these annotations. The corpus consists of 300 recipes written by members of the public, which we have annotated with domain-specific linguistic and semantic structure. Each recipe is annotated with (1) ‘recipe named entities’ (r-NEs) specific to the recipe domain, and (2) a flow graph representing in detail the sequencing of steps, and interactions between cooking tools, food ingredients and the products of intermediate steps. For these two kinds of annotations, inter-annotator agreement ranges from 82.3 to 90.5 F1, indicating that our annotation scheme is appropriate and consistent. We experiment with producing these annotations automatically. For r-NE tagging we train a deep neural network NER tool; to compute flow graphs we train a dependency-style parsing procedure which we apply to the entire sequence of r-NEs in a recipe. In evaluations, our systems achieve 71.1 to 87.5 F1, demonstrating that our annotation scheme is learnable.

We present a linguistic analysis of a set of English and Spanish verb+noun combinations (VNCs), and a method to use this information to improve VNC identification. Firstly, a sample of frequent VNCs are analysed in-depth and tagged along lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic dimensions, obtaining satisfactory inter-annotator agreement scores. Then, a VNC identification experiment is undertaken, where the analysed linguistic data is combined with chunking information and syntactic dependencies. A comparison between the results of the experiment and the results obtained by a basic detection method shows that VNC identification can be greatly improved by using linguistic information, as a large number of additional occurrences are detected with high precision.

We have integrated the RASP system with the UIMA framework (RASP4UIMA) and used this to parse the XML-encoded version of the British National Corpus (BNC). All original annotation is preserved, and parsing information, mainly in the form of grammatical relations, is added in an XML format. A few specific adaptations of the system to give better results with the BNC are discussed briefly. The RASP4UIMA system is publicly available and can be used to parse other corpora or document collections, and the final parsed version of the BNC will be deposited with the Oxford Text Archive.

We address the issue of how to associate frequency information with lexicalized grammar formalisms, using Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar as a representative framework. We consider systematically a number of alternative probabilistic frameworks, evaluating their adequacy from both a theoretical and empirical perspective using data from existing large treebanks. We also propose three orthogonal approaches fo r backing off probability estimates to cope with the large number of parameters involved.

We describe an approach to robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of unrestricted naturally-occurring (English) input. The technique involves parsing sequences of part-of-speech and punctuation labels using a unification-based grammar coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We describe the coverage of several corpora using this grammar and report the results of a parsing experiment using probabilities derived from bracketed training data. We report the first substantial experiments to assess the contribution of punctuation to deriving an accurate syntactic analysis, by parsing identical texts both with and without naturally-occurring punctuation marks.