Parsing Indian English News Headlines

Parsing news Headlines is one of the difficult tasks of Natural Language Processing. It is mostly because news Headlines (NHs) are not complete grammatical sentences. News editors use all sorts of tricks to grab readers’ attention, for instance, unusual capitalization as in the headline’ Ear SHOT ashok rajagopalan’; some are world knowledge demanding like ‘Church reformation celebrated’ where the ‘Church reformation’ refers to a historical event and not a piece of news about an ordinary church. The lack of transparency in NHs can be linguistic, cultural, social, or contextual. The lack of space provided for a news headline has led to creative liberty. Though many works like news value extraction, summary generation, emotion classification of NHs have been going on, parsing them had been a tough challenge. Linguists have also been interested in NHs for creativity in the language used by bending traditional grammar rules. Researchers have conducted studies on news reportage, discourse analysis of NHs, and many more. While the creativity seen in NHs is fascinating for language researchers, it poses a computational challenge for Natural Language Processing researchers. This paper presents an outline of the ongoing doctoral research on the parsing of Indian English NHs. The ultimate aim of this research is to provide a module that will generate correctly parsed NHs. The intention is to enhance the broad applicability of newspaper corpus for future Natural Language Processing applications.