
338 Chapter 12 Natural laNguage INterfaCe: QuestIoN aNswerINg system
Minipar, a fast and robust functional-dependency parser. The Sapere system
detects the following types of relationships: subject-verb-object (including
passive constructions), adjective-noun modification, noun-noun modifica-
tion, possessive, predicate nominatives, predicate adjectives, appositives, and
prepositional phrases.
Ternary expressions are similarly derived from the question, with the
wh-entity left as an unbound variable. Sapere attempts to match relation-
ships in the question with those found in the corpus text, thereby binding
the unbound variable in ...