The Cico Domain-Based Parser

Domain-based parsing is a shallow parsing technique that exploits knowledge about domain-specific properties of terms in order to determine "optimal" parse trees for natural language sentences. Cico is a simple parser using domain-based parsing. It is particularly well suited for parsing natural language sentences of technical nature (e.g., requirements documents for software systems), as in this case several simplifying assumptions hold, and has been used successfully in several experiments in the requirement engineering field. In the first part of this report, we describe formally the parsing algorithm implemented by Cico, and give some experimental data on its performance. In the second part, we provide a complete user manual for cico3, an implementation of the Cico algorithm, and for a number of associated tools. Finally, in the third part, we present some illustrative example taken from real applications.