A method is provided for identifying non-local relationships between licensing elements in a text segment and a word or phrase external to the text segment during a syntactic parse. Under the method, certain syntactic rules for combining words or phrases with text segments indicate that there is a possibility that the word or phrase being combined with the text segment will fill a gap in a relationship within the text segment. Based on this possibility, the text segment is searched to determine if there are any unfilled gaps in the text segment. Under some embodiments, if an unfilled gap is found, the location of the gap and the role the word or phrase plays in the gap are stored in a data structure associated with the syntactic node formed by combining the word or phrase with the text segment.