8. A computer-implemented method of determining grammatical elements to be assigned to a textual input, the method comprising: receiving the textual input and parsing the textual input into a plurality of textual phrases; for each of the plurality of textual phrases, using a processor of the computer to implement at least one statistical local model comprising a grammatical element identifier model and a grammatical element assignment model, wherein the grammatical element identifier model is utilized to determine whether a grammatical element is to be assigned to the textual phrase and, if so, the grammatical element assignment model is utilized to identify at least one of a plurality of different grammatical elements to be assigned to the textual phrase, wherein the at least one statistical local model identifies the at least one grammatical element to be assigned to the textual phrase based on syntactic features of the textual phrase independent of grammatical elements identified to be assigned to the other textual phrases of the plurality of textual phrases, wherein the grammatical element identifier model comprises a two class classifier and the grammatical element assignment model comprises a multi-class classifier having a number of classes at least as great as a number of the plurality of different grammatical elements; and using the processor of the computer to implement a statistical joint model configured to determine whether a grammatical element is to be assigned to the textual phrase and, if so, to identify at least one of the plurality of different grammatical elements to be assigned to the textual phrase, wherein the statistical joint model identifies the at least one grammatical element to be assigned to the textual phrase based on grammatical elements identified in the other textual phrases of the plurality of textual phrases; and outputting a selected text phrase along with an indication of a grammatical element assigned to it.
10. The method of claim 8 wherein outputting comprises: outputting the selected text phrase with the identified grammatical element placed within the selected text phrase.