Text Understanding With GETARUNS For Q/A And Summarization

Summarization and Question Answering need precise linguistic information with a much higher coverage than what is being offered by currently available statistically based systems. We assume that the starting point of any interesting application in these fields must necessarily be a good syntacticsemantic parser. In this paper we present the system for text understanding called GETARUNS, General Text and Reference Understanding System (Delmonte, 2003a). The heart of the system is a rule-based top-down DCG-style parser, which uses an LFG oriented grammar organization. The parser produces an f-structure as a DAG which is then used to create a Logical Form, the basis for all further semantic representation. GETARUNS, has a highly sophisticated linguistically based semantic module which is used to build up the Discourse Model. Semantic processing is strongly modularized and distributed amongst a number of different submodules which take care of SpatioTemporal Reasoning, Discourse Level Anaphora Resolution.