Looking for semantic patterns in computer marketplace advertisements



Hello, I really need help on the following.. I'm doing research for my
thesis work, which deals with capturing a Natural Language
advertisement, written in
English [which is not my main language - I apologise for my errors],
and sending it to a parser. The (bottom up) parser outputs a computer
understandable description of the advertisement deconstructing it with
the help of a
lexicon, a two level grammar and a domain-dependent ontology. My main
reference for this part of my study has been the book "Natural Language
Understanding" by Allen.

The scenario I'd like to depict is the following: a
"computer-uneducated" person (I mean a person who doesn't have nor
*wants* to have specific knowledge or competence about the domain of
computers and computer components) gives a short Natural Language
description
(typing into an imaginary internet computer-shop dialog ) of the
machine he would like to buy, specifying what he would use it for (e.g.
3d rendering, word processing, etc) and broadly adding non technical
requirements such as maximum price, a flat monitor and so on..

Now, I'm told to build a statistically significant corpus of
sentences to (at least try to) capture a certain "structure" in the
sencences: I want to see if I can spot some kind of recurrent pattern
coming through them, in order to fine-tune my grammar.

Browsing ebay pages doesn't help, because people buying/selling
computers simply enumerate a number of technical features without any
structure! My question is, all of you being English language speakers,
would you make me some examples(or direct me towards a list of ads, or
whatever..) of the way you (or your mother, father, grandmother ,etc)
would, say, talk to a salesclerk or shop assistant when you're on the
market for a computer? Obviously without introducing technical specs..

Thank you for your time, anyway!

Giuseppe

.



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