Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
S E M I N A R
Automating Information Extraction Task for Turkish Texts
Serhan Tatar
Ph.D. Dissertation
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent UniversityThroughout history, mankind has often suffered from a lack of necessary resources. In today's information world, the challenge can sometimes be a wealth of resources. That is to say, an excessive amount of information implies the need to and extract necessary information. Information extraction can be defined as the identification of selected types of entities, relations, facts or events in a set of unstructured text documents in a natural language. The goal of our research is to build a system that automatically locates and extracts information from Turkish unstructured texts. Our study focuses on two basic IE tasks: Named Entity Recognition and Entity Relation Detection. Named Entity Recognition, finding named entities (persons, locations, organizations, etc.) located in unstructured texts, is one of the most fundamental IE tasks. Entity Relation Detection task tries to identify relationships between entities mentioned in text documents. Using supervised learning strategy, the developed systems starts with a set of examples collected from a training dataset and generates the extraction rules from the given examples by using a carefully designed coverage algorithm. Moreover, several rule filtering and rule refinement techniques are utilized to maximize generalization and accuracy at the same. In order to obtain accurate generalization, we use several syntactic and semantic features of the text, including: orthographical, contextual, lexical and morphological features. In particular, morphological features of the text are effectively used in this study to increase the extraction performance for Turkish, an agglutinative language. Since the system does not rely on handcrafted rules/patterns, it does not heavily suffer from domain adaptability problem. The results of the conducted experiments show that (1) the developed systems are successfully applicable to the Named Entity Recognition and Entity Relation Detection tasks, and (2) exploiting morphological features can significantly improve the performance of information extraction from Turkish, an agglutinative language.
DATE: 11 January, 2011, Tuesday @ 10:00
PLACE: EA409