Automatic Acquisition of Training Data for Statistical Parsers

The limitations of existing data sets for training parsers has led to a need for additional data. However, the cost of manually annotating the amount and range of data required is prohibitive. For a number of simple facts like those sought in Question Answering, we compile a corpus of sentences extracted from the Web that contain the fact keywords. We use a state-of-the-art parser to parse these sentences, constraining the analysis of the more complex sentences using information from the simpler sentences. This allows us to automatically create additional annotated sentences which we then use to augment our existing training data.