Markup is Markup

Natural Language Processing for the World Wide Web

Volume

Papers from the 1997 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

This position paper makes several simple points that locate the treatment of Web pages within the spectrum of approaches to the texts that are normally used by the linguistically sophisticated language processing community. The first point is that what ostensibly makes the Web a special kind of text, html markup and links, is just a variation, albeit a very populist one, on text types that much of the community has been working with for a long time. Two other points deal with specific techniques that the author has used in his own work with such texts which seem to be particularly effective at providing a graded syntactic and semantic analysis of unconstrained texts with markup.