Active tags for semantic analysis

Abstract

We propose a new method for semantic analysis. The method is based on handwritten context-free grammars enriched with semantic tags. Associating the rules of a context-free grammar with semantic tags is beneficial; however, after parsing the tags are spread across the parse tree and it is usually hard to extract the complete semantic information from it. Thus, we developed an easy-to-use and yet very powerful mechanism for tag propagation. The mechanism allows the semantic information to be easily extracted from the parse tree. The propagation mechanism is based on an idea to add propagation instruction to the semantic tags. The tags with such instructions are called active tags in this article. Using the proposed method we developed a useful tool for semantic parsing that we offer for free on our internet pages. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.