Relational indexing using a grammarless parser

The article proposes an alternate view on natural language parsing. Instead of looking for some predefined (phrase) structure it takes inter-word relations as a starting point. The reason for this is twofold: firstly it circumvents traditional parsing and linguistic problems and secondly it offers a possibility to extract information specifically needed by IR applications. The close relationship with index expressions opens the door to feedback mechanisms like 'Query By Navigation' (P.D. Bruza and T.P. van der Weide, 1992) and conceptual knowledge extraction (F. Grootjen, 2000). The presented ideas are accompanied by an implementation and a small scale experiment.