actually I was a probie in the field...Syntactic parsing, and use tregex to search for various noun phrases.
Stanford Parser: http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/lex-parser.shtml
Stanford Parser Demo: http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/
Tregex: http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tregex.shtml
Tregex Doc: http://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/trees/tregex/TregexPattern.html
You'll need to some knowledge (or help) about running Linux commands to use these tools, and you'll need to figure out the Tregex patterns for your NPs.