Contents › Section 8: Corpora, tools and language technology › answer 3 of 22
Detecting actions within text
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The area of research you want to look at is local grammars (an approach developed in the late 1990s). It's been used for identifying things like commands, definitions, etc. in text. The idea is that certain functional areas can be identified through certain construction patterns and keywords based on their distribution in a corpus. These patterns constitute a sort of island of regularity (a local grammar) and can be spotted in the text.
Here is an example of their application and here's some more background.
I think the linguistic community outside NLP and corpus studies should pay more attention to local grammars because they have the potential to reveal aspects of how humans deal with complex patterns in texts.
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).