text: Thus , over the past few years , along with advances in the use of learning and statistical methods for acquisition of full parsers ( Collins , 1997 ; Charniak , 1997a ; Charniak , 1997b ; Ratnaparkhi , 1997 ) , significant progress has been made on the use of statistical learning methods to recognize shallow parsing patterns syntactic phrases or words that participate in a syntactic relationship ( Church , 1988 ; Ramshaw and Marcus , 1995 ; Argamon et al. , 1998 ; Cardie and Pierce , 1998 ; Munoz et al. , 1999 ; Punyakanok and Roth , 2001 ; Buchholz et al. , 1999 ; Tjong Kim Sang and Buchholz , 2000 ) .