Extracting Noun Phrases from Large-Scale Texts:

A Hybrid Approach and Its Automatic Evaluation

Kuang-hua Chen and Hsin-Hsi Chen
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Taiwan University
Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
Internet: hh_chen@csie.ntu.edu.tw
Abstract
To acquire noun phrases from running texts is useful for
many applications, such as word grouping, terminology
indexing, etc. The reported literatures adopt pure
probabilistic approach, or pure rule-based noun phrases
grammar to tackle this problem. In this paper, we apply
a probabilistic chunker to deciding the implicit
boundaries of constituents and utilize the linguistic
knowledge to extract the noun phrases by a finite state
mechanism. The test texts are SUSANNE Corpus and
the results are evaluated by comparing the parse field of
SUSANNE Corpus automatically. The results of this
preliminary experiment are encouraging.

1. Introduction
From the cognitive point of view, human being must
recognize, learn and understand the entities or concepts
(concrete or abstract) in the texts for natural language
comprehension. These entities or concepts are usually
described by noun phrases. The evidences from the
language learning of children also show the belief (Snow
and Ferguson, 1977). Therefore, if we can grasp the
noun phases of the texts, we will understand the texts to
some extent. This consideration is also captured by
theories of discourse analysis, such as Discourse
Representation Theory (Kamp, 1981).
Traditionally, to make out the noun phrases in a text
means to parse the text and to resolve the attachment
relations among the constituents. However, parsing the
text completely is very difficult, since various
ambiguities cannot be resolved solely by syntactic or
semantic information. Do we really need to fully parse
the texts in every application? Some researchers apply
shallow or partial parsers (Smadja, 1991; Hindle, 1990)
to acquiring specific patterns from texts. These tell us
that it is not necessary to completely parse the texts for
some applications.
This paper will propose a probabilistic partial parser
and incorporate linguistic knowledge to extract noun

phrases. The partial parser is motivated by an intuition

(Abney, 1991):
(1) When we read a sentence, we read it chunk by
chunk.
Abney uses two level grammar rules to implement the
parser through pure LR parsing technique. The first
level grammar rule takes care of the chunking process.
The second level grammar rule tackles the attachment
problems among chunks. Historically, our statisticsbased partial parser is called chunker. The chunker
receives tagged texts and outputs a linear chunk
sequences. We assign a syntactic head and a semantic
head to each chunk. Then, we extract the plausible
maximal noun phrases according to the information of
syntactic head and semantic head, and a finite state
mechanism with only 8 states.
Section 2 will give a brief review of the works for the
acquisition of noun phrases. Section 3 will describe the
language model for chunker. Section 4 will specify how
to apply linguistic knowledge to assigning heads to each
chunk. Section 5 will list the experimental results of
chunker. Following Section 5, Section 6 will give the
performance of our work on the retrieval of noun phrases.
The possible extensions of the proposed work will be
discussed in Section 7. Section 8 will conclude the
remarks.

2. Previous Works
Church (1988) proposes a part of speech tagger and a
simple noun phrase extractor. His noun phrase extractor
brackets the noun phrases of input tagged texts according
to two probability matrices: one is starting noun phrase
matrix; the other is ending noun phrase matrix. The
methodology is a simple version of Garside and Leech's
probabilistic parser (1985). Church lists a sample text in
the Appendix of his paper to show the performance of his
work. It demonstrates only 5 out of 248 noun phrases are
omitted. Because the tested text is too small to assess the
results, the experiment for large volume of texts is needed.

Bourigault (1992) reports a tool, LEXTER, for

extracting terminologies from texts. LEXTER triggers
two-stage processing: 1) analysis (by identification of
frontiers), which extracts the maximal-length noun
phrase; 2) parsing (the maximal-length noun phrases),
which, furthermore, acquires the terminology embedded
in the noun phrases. Bourigault declares the LEXTER
extracts 95% maximal-length noun phrases, that is,
43500 out of 46000 from test corpus. The result is
validated by an expert. However, the precision is not
reported in the Boruigault's paper.
Voutilainen (1993) announces NPtool for acquisition
of maximal-length noun phrases. NPtool applies two
finite state mechanisms (one is NP-hostile; the other is
NP-friendly) to the task. The two mechanisms produce
two NP sets and any NP candidate with at least one
occurrence in both sets will be labeled as the "ok" NP.
The reported recall is 98.5-100% and the precision is 9598% validated manually by some 20000 words. But from
the sample text listed in Appendix of his paper, the recall
is about 85% and we can find some inconsistencies
among these extracted noun phrases.

tn to the respective words. Now the real working model

is:
P(Ci | t1n )
(4) C* = argmax
C
i

Using bi-gram language model, we then reduce P(Ci|t1,

t2, ..., tn) as (5),
(5)

P ( Ci | t 1n ) = Pi ( c1n | t 1n )
i

mi

Pi ( ck | ck 1 , t 1n ) Pi ( ck | t1n )
k =1
mi

Pi ( ck | ck 1 ) Pi ( ck )
k =1

where Pi( ) denotes the probability for the i'th chunk

sequence and c0 denotes the beginning mark of a
sentence. Following (5), formula (4) becomes
(6) argmax P ( Ci | t 1n )
Ci

mi

argmax Pi ( ck | ck 1 ) Pi ( ck )
Ci

3. Language Model
Parsing can be viewed as optimizing. Suppose an nword sentence, w1, w2, ..., wn (including punctuation
marks), the parsing task is to find a parsing tree T, such
that P(T|w1, w2, ..., wn) has the maximal probability. We
define T here to be a sequence of chunks, c1, c2, ..., cm,
and each ci (0 < i m ) contains one or more words wj
(0 < j n) . For example, the sentence "parsing can be
viewed as optimization." consists of 7 words. Its one
possible parsing result under our demand is:
(2) [parsing] [can be viewed] [as optimization] [.]
c1
c2
c3
c4

k =1
mi

= argmax [log( Pi ( ck | ck 1 )) + log( Pi ( ck ))]

Ci

k =1

In order to make the expression (6) match the intuition of

human being, namely, 1) the scoring metrics are all
positive, 2) large value means high score, and 3) the
scores are between 0 and 1, we define a score function
S(P()) shown as (7).
(7) S(P()) = 0
when P() = 0;
S(P()) = 1.0/(1.0+ABS(log(P())))

o/w.

We then rewrite (6) as (8).

(8) C* = argmax P ( Ci | t1n )
Ci

Now, the parsing task is to find the best chunk sequence,

C*, such that
(3)

C* = argmax
P(Ci | w1n )
C
i

The Ci is one possible chunk sequence, c1, c2, ..., cm ,

i
where mi is the number of chunks of the possible chunk
sequence. To chunk raw text without other information
is very difficult, since the word patterns are many
millions. Therefore, we apply a tagger to preprocessing
the raw texts and give each word a unique part of speech.
That is, for an n-word sentence, w1, w2, ..., wn (including
punctuation marks), we assign part of speeches t1, t2, ...,

mi

argmax
Pi ( ck |ck 1 ) Pi ( ck )
C
i

k =1
mi

= argmax
[log( Pi ( ck |ck 1 )) + log( Pi ( ck ))]
C
i

k =1
mi

= argmax
[ S ( Pi ( ck |ck1 )) + S ( Pi ( ck ))]
C
i

k =1

The final language model is to find a chunk sequence C*,

which satisfies the expression (8).
Dynamic programming shown in (9) is used to find
the best chunk sequence. The score[i] denotes the score
of position i. The words between position pre[i] and
position i form the best chunk from the viewpoint of
position i. The dscore(ci) is the score of the probability

P(ci) and the cscore(ci|ci-1) is the score of the probability

P(ci|ci-1). These scores are collected from the training
corpus, SUSANNE corpus (Sampson, 1993; Sampson,
1994). The details will be touched on in Section 5.
(9) Algorithm
input : word sequence w1, w2, ..., wn, and
the corresponding POS sequence t1, t2, ..., tn
output : a sequence of chunks c1, c2, ..., cm
1. score[0] = 0;
pre[0] = 0;
2. for (i = 1; i<n+1; i++) do 3 and 4;

For example, LOB corpus defines four kinds of verbial

words under the coarse POS V: VB*, DO*, BE* and
HV*2. The secondary priority within the coarse POS V
is:
(12) VB* > HV* > DO* > BE*
Furthermore, we define the semantic head and the
syntactic head (Abney, 1991).
(13) Semantic head is the head of a phrase
according to the semantic usage; but
syntactic head is the head based on the
grammatical relations.

3. j*=maxarg (score[pre[j]]+dscore(cj)+cscore(cj|cj-1));
0 j< i

where cj = tj+1, ..., ti;

cj-1 = tpre[j]+1, ..., tj;
4. score[i]=score[pre[j*]]+dscore(cj*)+cscore(cj*|cj*-1);
pre[i] = j*;
5. for (i=n; i>0; i=pre[i]) do
output the word wpre[i]+1, ..., wi to form a chunk;

4. Linguistic Knowledge
In order to assign a head to each chunk, we first define
priorities of POSes. X'-theory (Sells, 1985) has defined
the X'-equivalences shown as Table 1.

Both the syntactic head and the semantic head are useful
in extracting noun phrases. For example, if the semantic
head of a chunk is the noun and the syntactic one is the
preposition, it would be a prepositional phrase.
Therefore, it can be connected to the previous noun
chunk to form a new noun phrase. In some case, we will
find some chunks contain only one word, called oneword chunks. They maybe contain a conjunction, e.g.,
that. Therefore, the syntactic head and the semantic
head of one-word chunks are the word itself.
Following these definitions, we extract the noun
phrases by procedure (14):

Table 1. X'-Equivalences
X
N
V
A
P
INFL

X'
N'
V'
A'
P'
S (I')

(14) (a) Tag the input sentences.

(b) Partition the tagged sentences into
chunks by using a probabilistic partial
parser.
(c) Decide the syntactic head and the
semantic head of each chunk.
(d) According to the syntactic and the
semantic heads, extract noun phrase
from these chunks and connect as
many noun phrases as possible by a
finite state mechanism.

X"
NP
VP
AP
PP
S' (IP)

Table 1 defines five different phrasal structures and the

hierarchical structures. The heads of these phrasal
structures are the first level of X'-Equivalences, that is, X.
The other grammatical constituents function as the
specifiers or modifiers, that is, they are accompanying
words not core words. Following this line, we define the
primary priority of POS listed in Table 1.

raw
texts
TAGGER

In order to extract the exact head, we further define

Secondary POS priority among the 134 POSes defined in
LOB corpus (Johansson, 1986).

LOB
CORPUS

We do not consider the INFL, since our model will not touch on this
structure.

chunked
texts
NP-TRACTOR

SUSANNE
CORPUS

NP set
recall &
precision

NP set
EVALUATION

Figure 1. The Noun Phrases Extraction Procedure

Figure 1 shows the procedure. The input raw texts will
be assigned POSes to each word and then pipelined into
2

CHUNKER

TAG-MAPPER

(10) Primary POS priority1 : V > N > A > P

(11) Secondary POS priority is a linear

precedence relationship within the primary
priorities for coarse POSes

tagged
texts

Asterisk * denotes wildcard. Therefore, VB* represents VB (verb ,

base form), VBD (verb, preterite), VBG (present participle), VBN (past
participle) and VBZ (3rd singular form of verb).

a chunker. The tag sets of LOB and SUSANNE are

different. Since the tag set of SUSANNE corpus is
subsumed by the tag set of LOB corpus, a TAGMAPPER is used to map tags of SUSANNE corpus to
those of LOB corpus. The chunker will output a
sequence of chunks.
Finally, a finite state NPTRACTOR will extract NPs. Figure 2 shows the finite
state mechanism used in our work.
5

7
CD*
P*

P*

A*
0

A*

J* or P*$
NR*

J* or
OD*

VBN or
J* or OD*
VBG
VBN or
VBG
N*
3
2
VBN or
N*
VBG

IN
4
N*

VBN or VBG
N*

6
NR*

Figure 2. The Finite State Machine for Noun Phrases

The symbols in Figure 2 are tags of LOB corpus. N*
denotes nous; P* denotes pronouns; J* denotes adjectives;
A* denotes quantifiers, qualifiers and determiners; IN
denotes prepositions; CD* denotes cardinals; OD*
denotes ordinals, and NR* denotes adverbial nouns.
Asterisk * denotes a wildcard. For convenience, some
constraints, such as syntactic and semantic head
checking, are not shown in Figure 2.

5. First Stage of Experiments

Following the procedures depicted in Figure 1, we
should train a chunker firstly. This is done by using the
SUSANNE Corpus (Sampson, 1993; Sampson, 1994) as
the training texts. The SUSANNE Corpus is a modified
and condensed version of Brown Corpus (Francis and
Kucera, 1979). It only contains the 1/10 of Brown
Corpus, but involves more information than Brown
Corpus. The Corpus consists of four kinds of texts: 1) A:
press reportage; 2) G: belles letters, biography, memoirs;
3) J: learned writing; and 4) N: adventure and Western
fiction. The Categories of A, G, J and N are named from
respective categories of the Brown Corpus. Each
Category consists of 16 files and each file contains about
2000 words.
The following shows a snapshot of SUSANNE Corpus.
G01:0010a - YB

<minbrk>

G01:0010b - JJ

NORTHERN

northern

[Oh.Oh]
[O[S[Np:s.

G01:0010c - NN2

liberals

liberal

.Np:s]

G01:0010d - VBR

are

be

[Vab.Vab]

G01:0010e - AT

the

the

[Np:e.

G01:0010f - JB

chief

chief

G01:0010g - NN2

supporters

supporter

G01:0010h - IO

of

of

[Po.

G01:0010i - JJ

civil

civil

[Np.

G01:0010j - NN2

rights

right

.Np]

G01:0020a - CC

and

and

[Po+.

G01:0020b - IO

of

of

G01:0020c - NN1u integration

integration

.Po+]Po]Np:e]S]

G01:0020d - YF

+.

Table 2 lists basic statistics of SUSANNE Corpus.

Table 2. The Overview of SUSANNE Corpus
Categories
A
G
J
N
Total

Files
16
16
16
16
64

Paragraphs
767
280
197
723
1967

Sentences
1445
1554
1353
2568
6920

Words
37180
37583
36554
38736
150053

In order to avoid the errors introduced by tagger, the

SUSANNE corpus is used as the training and testing
texts. Note the tags of SUSANNE corpus are mapped to
LOB corpus. The 3/4 of texts of each categories of
SUSANNE Corpus are both for training the chunker and
testing the chunker (inside test). The rest texts are only
for testing (outside test). Every tree structure contained
in the parse field is extracted to form a potential chunk
grammar and the adjacent tree structures are also
extracted to form a potential context chunk grammar.
After the training process, total 10937 chunk grammar
rules associated with different scores and 37198 context
chunk grammar rules are extracted. These chunk
grammar rules are used in the chunking process.
Table 3 lists the time taken for processing SUSANNE
corpus. This experiment is executed on the Sun Sparc
10, model 30 workstation. T denotes time, W word, C
chunk, and S sentence. Therefore, T/W means the time
taken to process a word on average.
Table 3. The Processing Time

A
G
J
N
Av.

T/W
0.00295
0.00283
0.00275
0.00309
0.00291

T/C
0.0071
0.0069
0.0073
0.0066
0.0070

T/S
0.0758
0.0685
0.0743
0.0467
0.0663

According to Table 3, to process a word needs 0.00291

seconds on average. To process all SUSANNE corpus
needs about 436 seconds, or 7.27 minutes.
In order to evaluate the performance of our chunker,
we compare the results of our chunker with the
denotation made by the SUSANNE Corpus. This
comparison is based on the following criterion:
(15) The content of each chunk should be
dominated by one non-terminal node in
SUSANNE parse field.

This criterion is based on an observation that each nonterminal node has a chance to dominate a chunk.
Table 4 is the experimental results of testing the
SUSANNE Corpus according to the specified criterion.
As usual, the symbol C denotes chunk and S denotes
sentence.

around 150,000 words including punctuation marks.

The time needed from inputting texts of SUSANNE
Corpus to outputting the extracted noun phrases is listed
in Table 5. Comparing with Table 3, the time of
combining chunks to form the candidate noun phrases is
not significant.

Table 4. Experimental Results

Table 5. Time for Acquisition of Noun Phrases

TEST

OUTSIDE TEST
C
S
4866
380
40
14
4906
394
0.99
0.96
4748
355
153
32
4901
387
0.97
0.92
4335
283
170
15
4505
298
0.96
0.95
5163
536
79
42
5242
578
0.98
0.93
19112
1554
442
103
19554
1657
0.98
0.94

Cat.
# of correct

# of incorrect
total #
correct rate
# of correct

# of incorrect
total #
correct rate
# of correct

# of incorrect
total #
correct rate
# of correct

# of incorrect
total #
correct rate
# of correct

Av.

# of incorrect
total #
correct rate

INSIDE TEST
C
S
10480
1022
84
29
10564
1051
0.99
0.97
10293
1130
133
37
10426
1167
0.99
0.97
9193
1032
88
23
9281
1055
0.99
0.98
12717
1906
172
84
12889
1990
0.99
0.96
42683
5090
477
173
43160
5263
0.99
0.97

Table 4 shows the chunker has more than 98% chunk

correct rate and 94% sentence correct rate in outside test,
and 99% chunk correct rate and 97% sentence correct
rate in inside test. Note that once a chunk is mischopped,
the sentence is also mischopped. Therefore, sentence
correct rate is always less than chunk correct rate.
Figure 3 gives a direct view of the correct rate of this
chunker.

A
G
J
N
Total

Words
37180
37583
36554
38736
150053

Time (sec.)
112.32
108.80
103.04
122.72
446.88

Time/Word
0.00302
0.00289
0.00282
0.00317
0.00298

The evaluation is based on two metrics: precision and

recall. Precision means the correct rate of what the
system gets. Recall indicates the extent to which the real
noun phrases retrieved from texts against the real noun
phrases contained in the texts. Table 6 describes how to
calculate these metrics.
Table 6. Contingency Table for Evaluation
SUSANNE
System

NP
non-NP

NP

non-NP

a
c

b
-

The rows of "System" indicate our NP-TRACTOR thinks

the candidate as an NP or not an NP; the columns of
"SUSANNE" indicate SUSANNE Corpus takes the
candidate as an NP or not an NP. Following Table 6, we
will calculate precision and recall shown as (16).
(16) Precision = a/(a+b) * 100%
Recall = a/(a+c) * 100%

1
0.98
0.96
0.94

A
G
J
N
Avg.

0.92
0.9
0.88

Chunk

Sentence

Outside Test

Chunk

Sentence

Inside Test

Figure 3. The Correct Rate of Experiments

To calculate the precision and the recall based on the

parse field of SUSANNE Corpus is not so
straightforward at the first glance. For example, (17)3
itself is a noun phrse but it contains four noun phrases.
A tool for extracting noun phrases should output what
kind of and how many noun phrases, when it processes
the texts like (17). Three kinds of noun phrases
(maximal noun phrases, minimal noun phrases and
ordinary noun phrases) are defined first. Maximal noun
phrases are those noun phrases which are not contained
in other noun phrases. In contrast, minimal noun
phrases do not contain any other noun phrases.

6. Acquisition of Noun Phrases

We employ the SUSANNE Corpus as test corpus. Since
the SUSANNE Corpus is a parsed corpus, we may use it
as criteria for evaluation. The volume of test texts is

This example is taken from N06:0280d-N06:0290d, Susanne Corpus

(N06 means file N06, 0280 and 0290 are the original line numbers in
Brown Corpus. Recall that the Susanne Corpus is a modified and reduced
version of Brown Corpus).

Apparently, a noun phrase may be both a maximal noun

phrase and a minimal noun phrase. Ordinary noun
phrases are noun phrases with no restrictions. Take (17)
as an example. It has three minimal noun phrases, one
maximal noun phrases and five ordinary noun phrases.
In general, a noun-phrase extractor forms the front end
of other applications, e.g., acquisition of verb
subcategorization frames. Under this consideration, it is
not appropriate to taking (17) as a whole to form a noun
phrase. Our system will extract two noun phrases from
(17), "a black badge of frayed respectability" and "his
neck".
(17) [[[a black badge] of [frayed respectability]]
that ought never to have left [his neck]]
We calculate the numbers of maximal noun phrases,
minimal noun phrases and ordinary noun phrases
denoted in SUSANNE Corpus, respectively and compare
these numbers with the number of noun phrases
extracted by our system.
Table 7 lists the number of ordinary noun phrases
(NP), maximal noun phrases (MNP), minimal noun
phrases (mNP) in SUSANNE Corpus. MmNP denotes
the maximal noun phrases which are also the minimal
noun phrases. On average, a maximal noun phrase
subsumes 1.61 ordinary noun phrases and 1.09 minimal
noun phrases.
Table 7. The Number of Noun Phrases in Corpus

A
G
J
N
Total

NP

MNP

mNP

MmNP

NP
MNP

10063
9221
8696
9851
37831

5614
5451
4568
7895
23528

6503
6143
5200
7908
25754

3207
3226
2241
5993
14667

1.79
1.69
1.90
1.25
1.61

mNP
MNP
1.16
1.13
1.14
1.00
1.09

To calculate the precision, we examine the extracted

noun phrases (ENP) and judge the correctness by the
SUSANNE Corpus. The CNP denotes the correct
ordinary noun phrases, CMNP the correct maximal noun
phrases, CmNP correct minimal noun phrases and
CMmNP the correct maximal noun phrases which are
also the minimal noun phrases. The results are itemized
in Table 8. The average precision is 95%.
Table 8. Precision of Our System

A
G
J
N
Total

ENP
8011
7431
6457
8861
30760

CNP
7660
6943
5958
8559
29120

CMNP
3709
3626
2701
6319
16355

CmNP
4348
4366
3134
6637
18485

CMmNP
3047
3028
2005
5808
13888

Precision
0.96
0.93
0.92
0.97
0.95

Here, the computation of recall is ambiguous to some

extent. Comparing columns CMNP and CmNP in Table
8 with columns MNP and mNP in Table 7, 70% of MNP
and 72% of mNP in SUSANNE Corpus are extracted. In
addition, 95% of MmNP is extracted by our system. It
means the recall for extracting noun phrases that exist
independently in SUSANNE Corpus is 95%. What types
of noun phrases are extracted are heavily dependent on
what applications we will follow. We will discuss this
point in Section 7. Therefore, the real number of the
applicable noun phrases in the Corpus is not known.
The number should be between the number of NPs and
that of MNPs. In the original design for NP-TRACTOR,
a maximal noun phrase which contains clauses or
prepositional phrases with prepositions other than "of" is
not considered as an extracted unit. As the result, the
number of such kinds of applicable noun phrases (ANPs)
form the basis to calculate recall. These numbers are
listed in Table 9 and the corresponding recalls are also
shown.
Table 9. The limitation of Values for Recall

A
G
J
N
Av.

ANP
7873
7199
6278
8793
30143

CNP
7660
6943
5958
8559
29120

Recall
0.97
0.96
0.95
0.97
0.96

The automatic validation of the experimental results

gives us an estimated recall. Appendix provides a
sample text and the extracted noun phrases. Interested
readers could examine the sample text and calculate
recall and precision for a comparison.

7. Applications
Identification of noun phrases in texts is useful for many
applications. Anaphora resolution (Hirst, 1981) is to
resolve the relationship of the noun phrases, namely,
what the antecedent of a noun phrase is. The extracted
noun phrases can form the set of possible candidates (or
universal in the terminology of discourse representation
theory). For acquisition of verb subcategorization frames,
to bracket the noun phrases in the texts is indispensable.
It can help us to find the boundary of the subject, the
object and the prepositional phrase. We would use the
acquired noun phrases for an application of adjective
grouping. The extracted noun phrases may contain
adjectives which pre-modify the head noun. We then
utilize the similarity of head nouns to group the adjectives.
In addition, we may give the head noun a semantic tag,
such as Roget's Thesaurus provides, and then analyze the
adjectives. To automatically produce the index of a book,

we would extract the noun phrases contained in the book,

calculate the inverse document frequency (IDF) and their
term frequency (TF) (Salton, 1991), and screen out the
implausible terms.
These applications also have impacts on identifying
noun phrases. For applications like anaphora resolution
and acquisition of verb subcategorization frames, the
maximal noun phrases are not suitable. For applications
like grouping adjectives and automatic book indexing,
some kinds of maximal noun phrases, such as noun
phrases postmodified by "of" prepositional phrases, are
suitable; but some are not, e.g., noun phrases modified by
relative clauses.

applications. A method is presented to extract the noun

phrases. Most importantly, the relations of maximal
noun phrases, minimal noun phrases, ordinary noun
phrases and applicable noun phrases are distinguished in
this work. Their impacts on the subsequent applications
are also addressed. In addition, automatic evaluation
provides a fair basis and does not involve human costs.
The experimental results show that this parser is a useful
tool for further research on large volume of real texts.

Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Dr. Geoffrey Sampson for his kindly
providing SUSANNE Corpus and the details of tag set to
us.

8. Concluding Remarks
The difficulty of this work is how to extract the real
maximal noun phrases. If we cannot decide the
prepositional phrase "over a husband eyes" is licensed by
the verb "pull", we will not know "the wool" and "a
husband eyes" are two noun phrases or form a noun
pharse combined by the preposition "over".
(18) to pull the wool over a husband eyes
to sell the books of my uncle
In contrast, the noun phrase "the books of my uncle" is
so called maximal noun phrase in current context. As
the result, we conclude that if we do not resolve PPattachment problem (Hindle and Rooth, 1993), to the
expected extent, we will not extract the maximal noun
phrases. In our work, the probabilistic chunker decides
the implicit boundaries between words and the NPTRACTOR connects the adjacent noun chunks. When a
noun chunk is followed by a preposition chunk, we do
not connect the two chunks except the preposition chunk
is led by "of" preposition.
Comparing with other works, our results are
evaluated by a parsed corpus automatically and show the
high precision. Although we do not point out the exact
recall, we provide estimated values. The testing scale is
large enough (about 150,000 words). In contrast,
Church (1988) tests a text and extracts the simple noun
phrases only. Bourigault's work (1992) is evaluated
manually, and dose not report the precision. Hence, the
real performance is not known. The work executed by
Voutilainen (1993) is more complex than our work. The
input text first is morphologizied, then parsed by
constraint grammar, analyzed by two different noun
phrases grammar and finally extracted by the
occurrences. Like other works, Voutilainen's work is
also evaluated manually.
In this paper, we propose a language model to chunk
texts. The simple but effective chunker could be seen as
a linear structure parser, and could be applied to many

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Appendix
For demonstration, we list a sample text quoted from
N18:0010a-N18:0250e, SUSANNE Corpus.
The
extracted noun phrases are bracketed. We could compute
the precision and the recall from the text as a reference
and compare the gap with the experimental results
itemized in Section 6. In actual, the result shows that the
system has high precision and recall for the text.
[ Too_QL many_AP people_NNS ] think_VB that_CS [ the_ATI
primary_JJ purpose_NN of_IN a_AT higher_JJR education_NN ] is_BEZ
to_TO help_VB [ you_PP2 ] make_VB [ a_AT living_NN ] +;_; this_DT
is_BEZ not_XNOT so_RB +,_, for_CS [ education_NN ] offers_VBZ
[ all_ABN kinds_NNS of_IN dividends_NNS ] +,_, including_IN
how_WRB to_TO pull_VB [ the_ATI wool_NN ] over_IN [ a_AT
husband_NN eyes_NNS ] while_CS [ you_PP2 ] are_BER having_HVG
[ an_AT affair_NN ] with_IN [ his_PP$ wife_NN ] ._. If_CS [ it_PP3 ]
were_BED not_XNOT for_IN [ an_AT old_JJ professor_NPT ]
who_WPR made_VBD [ me_PP1O ] read_VB [ the_ATI classics_NN ]
[ I_PP1A ] would_MD have_HV been_BEN stymied_VBN on_IN
what_WDT to_TO do_DO +,_, and_CC now_RN [ I_PP1A ]
understand_VB why_WRB [ they_PP3AS ] are_BER [ classics_NN ] +;_;
those_DTS who_WPR wrote_VBD [ them_PP3OS ] knew_VBD
[ people_NNS ] and_CC what_WDT made_VBD [ people_NNS ]
tick_VB ._. [ I_PP1A ] worked_VBD for_IN [ my_PP$ Uncle_NPT ]
(_( [ +an_AT Uncle_NPT by_IN marriage_NN ] so_RB [ you_PP2 ]
will_MD not_XNOT think_VB this_DT has_HVZ [ a_AT mild_JJ
undercurrent_NN of_IN incest_NN ] +)_) who_WPR ran_VBD
[ one_CD1 of_IN those_DTS antique_JJ shops_NNS ] in_IN [ New_JJ
Orleans_NP ] Vieux_&FW Carre_&FW +,_, [ the_ATI old_JJ French_JJ
Quarter_NPL ] ._. [ The_ATI arrangement_NN ] [ I_PP1A ] had_HVD
with_IN [ him_PP3O ] was_BEDZ to_TO work_VB [ four_CD
hours_NRS ] [ a_AT day_NR ] ._. [ The_ATI rest_NN of_IN the_ATI
time_NR ] [ I_PP1A ] devoted_VBD to_IN painting_VBG or_CC to_IN
those_DTS [ other_JJB activities_NNS ] [ a_AT young_JJ and_CC
healthy_JJ man_NN ] just_RB out_IN of_IN [ college_NN ] finds_VBZ

interesting_JJ ._. [ I_PP1A ] had_HVD [ a_AT one-room_JJ studio_NN ]

which_WDTR overlooked_VBD [ an_AT ancient_JJ courtyard_NN ]
filled_VBN with_IN [ flowers_NNS and_CC plants_NNS ] +,_,
blooming_VBG everlastingly_RB in_IN [ the_ATI southern_JJ
sun_NN ] ._. [ I_PP1A ] had_HVD come_VBN to_IN [ New_JJ
Orleans_NP ] [ two_CD years_NRS ] earlier_RBR after_IN
[ graduating_VBG college_NN ] +,_, partly_RB because_CS [ I_PP1A ]
loved_VBD [ the_ATI city_NPL ] and_CC partly_RB because_CS
there_EX was_BEDZ quite_QL [ a_AT noted_JJ art_NN colony_NN ]
there_RN ._. When_CS [ my_PP$ Uncle_NPT ]
offered_VBD
[ me_PP1O ] [ a_AT part-time_JJ job_NN ] which_WDTR would_MD
take_VB [ care_NN ] of_IN [ my_PP$ normal_JJ expenses_NNS ]
and_CC give_VB [ me_PP1O ] [ time_NR ] to_TO paint_VB [ I_PP1A ]
accepted_VBD ._. [ The_ATI arrangement_NN ] turned_VBD out_RP
to_TO be_BE excellent_JJ ._. [ I_PP1A ] loved_VBD [ the_ATI
city_NPL ] and_CC [ I_PP1A ] particularly_RB loved_VBD [ the_ATI
gaiety_NN and_CC spirit_NN ] of_IN [ Mardi_NR Gras_NR ] ._.
[ I_PP1A ] had_HVD seen_VBN [ two_CD of_IN them_PP3OS ] and_CC
[ we_PP1AS ] would_MD soon_RB be_BE in_IN another_DT citywide_JJ +,_, [ joyous_JJ celebration_NN with_IN romance_NN ] in_IN
[ the_ATI air_NN ] +;_; and_CC +,_, when_CS [ you_PP2 ] took_VBD
[ a_AT walk_NPL ] [ you_PP2 ] never_RB knew_VBD what_WDT
[ adventure_NN or_CC pair_NN of_IN sparkling_JJ eyes_NNS ]
were_BED waiting_VBG around_IN [ the_ATI next_OD corner_NPL ] ._.