Automatically Constructing a Dictionary for Information Extraction Tasks

Knowledge-based natural language processing systems have achieved good success with certain tasks but they are often criticized because they depend on a domain-specific dictionary that requires a great deal of manual knowledge engineering. This knowledge engineering bottleneck makes knowledge-based NLP systems impractical for real-world applications because theycannot beeasilyscaled upor ported to new domains. In response to this problem, we developed a system called AutoSlog that automatically builds a domain-specific dictionary of concepts for extracting information from text. Using AutoSlog, we constructed a dictionary for the domain of terrorist event descriptions in only 5 person-hours. We then compared the AutoSlog dictionary with a hand-crafted dictionary that was built by two highly skilled graduate students and required approximately 1500 person-hours of effort. We evaluated the two dictionaries using two blind test sets of 100 texts each. Overall, the AutoSlog dictionary a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1993
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ellen Riloff
• Keywords: AAAI 1993, Domain-specific Dictionary, Hand-crafted Dictionary, Intelligent Agents, Test Set