We develop a novel approach to the semantic analysis of short text segments and demonstrate its utility on a large corpus of Web search queries. Extracting meaning from short text segments is difficult as there is little semantic redundancy between terms; hence methods based on shallow semantic analysis may fail to accurately estimate meaning. Furthermore search queries lack explicit syntax often used to determine intent in question answering. In this paper we propose a hybrid model of semantic analysis combining explicit class-label extraction with a latent class PCFG. This class-label correlation (CLC) model admits a robust parallel approximation, allowing it to scale to large amounts of query data. We demonstrate its performance in terms of (1) its predicted label accuracy on polysemous queries and (2) its ability to accurately chunk queries into base constituents.

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In Proceedings of The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT 2011), pp. 1200-1209, June 2011.

@inproceedings{reisinger.aclhlt11, title={Fine-Grained Class Label Markup of Search Queries}, author={Joseph Reisinger and Marius Pasca}, booktitle={Proceedings of The 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (ACL-HLT 2011)}, month={June}, pages={1200-1209}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?reisinger:aclhlt11", year={2011} }