Background to SEER Proposal

1
Background to SEER Proposal

• TTT (Text Tokenisation Tool)
• output was LT TTT, an XML-based toolset for low
  level linguistic analysis and annotation
• used as basis of
• Participation in MUC7 named entity task
• mostly rule-based approach
• but incremental approach where max ent
  classifier was interleaved with rule-based
  annotation

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Other Projects

• DISP (Data Intensive Semantics Pragmatics)
• corpus of Medline abstracts
• annotation of domain specific entities and terms
  prior to parsing
• Mascara
• resolution of metonymy (e.g. place for
  organisation)
• named entity recognition a prerequisite

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Other Projects

• CROSSMARC
• Multilingual IE from web pages
• laptop computer and job offer domains
  non-standard set of entities
• EDIFY contract
• Recognition of person names and addresses in
  emails

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Different Domains, Different Entities

• MUC
• Web pages
• Laptops
• Job Ads
• Email
• Biomedical
• DISP
• BioCreative
• Legal

5
Machine Learning vs Rule-Based

• Rule-based systems tend to perform better but
  high labour costs.
• Machine learning approaches are becoming
  competitive.
• c.f. CoNLL 2002, 2003 shared task (Clark and
  Curran, Klein, Smarr, Nguyen and Manning).
• Machine learning still requires significant
  amounts of training material labour costs still
  high and adaptation to new domains still slow.

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Goals of the SEER Project

• To develop the means to recognise a wider variety
  of entities than before including ones not
  signalled by capitalisation.
• To experiment to find the most useful machine
  learning techniques.
• To investigate boot-strapping techniques in order
  to minimise the amount of training data needed.

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Where We Are Now

• wider variety of entities
• Chosen two very different domains, biomedical
  (genes, proteins etc) and architectural/archaeolog
  ical.
• experiment with machine learning techniques
• max ent tagging using CC and Stanford tagger
• investigate boot-strapping techniques to minimise
  the amount of training data needed
• STARTS TODAY!

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MUC Named Entity Recognition

• Helen Weir, the finance director of
  Kingfisher, was handed a 334,607 allowance last
  year to cover the costs of a relocation that
  appears to have shortened her commute by around
  15 miles. The payment to the 40-year-old amounts
  to roughly 23,000 a mile to allow her to move
  from Hampshire to Buckinghamshire after an
  internal promotion.