Pattern Matching and Discourse Processing in Information Extraction from Japanese Text

Abstract

Information extraction is the task of automaticallypicking up information of interest from an unconstrained text. Informationof interest is usually extracted in two steps. First, sentence level processing locates relevant pieces of information scatteredthroughout the text; second, discourse processing merges coreferential information to generate the output. In the first step, pieces of information are locally identified without recognizing any relationships among them. A key word search or simple patternsearch can achieve this purpose. The second step requires deeperknowledge in order to understand relationships among separately identified pieces of information. Previous information extraction systems focused on the first step, partly because they were not required to link up each piece of information with other pieces. To link the extracted pieces of information and map them onto a structuredoutput format, complex discourse processing is essential. This paperreports on a Japanese information extraction system that merges information using a pattern matcher and discourse processor. Evaluationresults show a high level of system performance which approaches human performance.