Syntactic Search by Example

TL;DR

This paper introduces a user-friendly system for searching large linguistically annotated corpora using syntactic patterns, enabling rapid, example-based querying without requiring detailed syntactic knowledge.

Contribution

It presents a lightweight query language and an efficient retrieval engine that facilitate syntax-based searches through example sentences with simple markup.

Findings

Achieved interactive search speeds with large corpora

Demonstrated system effectiveness on Wikipedia and PubMed abstracts

Enabled rapid exploration and refinement of syntactic queries

Abstract

We present a system that allows a user to search a large linguistically annotated corpus using syntactic patterns over dependency graphs. In contrast to previous attempts to this effect, we introduce a light-weight query language that does not require the user to know the details of the underlying syntactic representations, and instead to query the corpus by providing an example sentence coupled with simple markup. Search is performed at an interactive speed due to an efficient linguistic graph-indexing and retrieval engine. This allows for rapid exploration, development and refinement of syntax-based queries. We demonstrate the system using queries over two corpora: the English wikipedia, and a collection of English pubmed abstracts. A demo of the wikipedia system is available at: https://allenai.github.io/spike