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Can We Make Information Extraction More Adaptive?

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Information Extraction (SCIE 1999)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1714))

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Abstract

It seems widely agreed that IE (Information Extraction) is now a tested language technology that has reached precision+recall values that put it in about the same position as Information Retrieval and Machine Translation, both of which are widely used commercially. There is also a clear range of practical applications that would be eased by the sort of template-style data that IE provides. The problem for wider deployment of the technology is adaptability: the ability to customize IE rapidly to new domains.

In this paper we discuss some methods that have been tried to ease this problem, and to create something more rapid than the bench-mark one-month figure, which was roughly what ARPA teams in IE needed to adapt an existing system by hand to a new domain of corpora and templates. An important distinction in discussing the issue is the degree to which a user can be assumed to know what is wanted, to have pre-existing templates ready to hand, as opposed to a user who has a vague idea of what is needed from a corpus.

We shall discuss attempts to derive templates directly from corpora; to derive knowledge structures and lexicons directly from corpora, including discussion of the recent LE project ECRAN which attempted to tune existing lexicons to new corpora. An important issue is how far established methods in Information Retrieval of tuning to a user’s needs with feedback at an interface can be transferred to IE.

The authors are grateful to discussion and contributions from Hamish Cunningham, Robert Gaizauskas, Louise Guthrie and Evelyne Viegas, All errors are our own of course.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Sheffield, UK

    Yorick Wilks & Roberta Catizone

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  1. Yorick Wilks
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  2. Roberta Catizone
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Systems and Production, University of Roma, Tor Vergata, Via di Tor Vergata, I-00133, Roma, Italy

    Maria Teresa Pazienza

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Wilks, Y., Catizone, R. (1999). Can We Make Information Extraction More Adaptive?. In: Pazienza, M.T. (eds) Information Extraction. SCIE 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1714. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48089-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48089-7_1

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