Automatic Discovery of Linguistic Patterns for Information Extraction

May 2001

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2001)

Volume

Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 2001)

All Papers

Information Extraction (IE) systems typically rely on extraction patterns encoding domain-specific knowledge. When matched against natural language texts, these patterns recognize with high accuracy information relevant to the extraction task. Adapting an IE system to a new extraction scenario entails devising a new collection of extraction patterns - a time-consuming and expensive process. To overcome this obstacle, we have implemented in CICERO, our IE system, a pattern acquisition mechanism that combines lexicosemantic knowledge available from WordNet with syntactic information collected from training corpora. The open-domain nature of the knowledge encoded in WordNet grants portability of our approach across multiple extraction domains.