An Edit Distance Approach to Shallow Semantic Labeling

This paper proposes a model of semantic labeling based on the edit distance. The dynamic programming approach stresses on a non-exact string matching technique that takes full advantage of the underlying grammatical structure of 65,000 parse trees in a Treebank. Both part-of-speech and lexical similarity serve to identify the possible semantic labels, without miring into a pure linguistic analysis. The model described has been implemented. We also analyze the tradeoffs between the part-of-speech and lexical similarity in the semantic labeling. Experimental results for recognizing various labels in 10,000 sentences are used to justify its significances.