Parsing The Unparseable: Miss Teen South Carolina’s Answer

The folks over at Powerset, a much hyped natural language search engine, have a fun post on their blog where they point their parser at Miss Teen South Carolina’s now infamous answer to the question: “Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a map. Why do you think this is?”

First, her answer for those who may have missed it.

I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because uh some uh people out there in our nation don’t have maps and uh I believe that our ed- education like such as in South Africa and uh the- the Iraq everywhere like such as and I believe that they should uh our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or- or- should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future.

Now, the parse tree (full-size image here):