A bottom-up method for analyzing the domain of a sentence group

Abstract

Sentence group is a linguistic unit between a sentence and an article. It is mapped into contextual element, one of the four layers of linguistic conceptual space in HNC (Hierarchical Network of Concepts) theory. The contextual element is composed of three components: domain, situation and background, with domain in the head of them. To extract the domain and situation of a sentence group, this paper proposed a bottom-up method, which extracts domain-related conceptual symbols from words, and then obtains the domain of a sentence according to the frequencies of the domain-related words and their semantic roles in the sentence. Finally it got the domain of a sentence group by merging sentences with the same domain and got the boundary of the sentence group. The experiment shows that this method can tackle some types of sentence groups well in real corpus. However, there are still a lot of details to be studied in extracting the domain, confirming the boundary of sentence group and extracting the framework of a sentence group.