Linguistic patterns for encyclopaedic information extraction

Abstract

Information extraction has almost always focused on extracting retrievable data from a text. Approaches that manage to extract elaborated information have seldom been devised. Through the use of interlingua-type language-independent contents representation, the semantic relations of the contents can be used to search a set of information concerning a particular entity. This way, the person asking a question to find out something about a city or a person, for example, would have to know no more than the name to be used to run a search. This approach is very promising as the person asking the question does not have to know what type of information he or she can request from a documentary source. Our work targets the goal of, given a user's query, providing a complete report about such topic or event, composed of what we consider encyclopaedic knowledge. We describe the origins of this research and the followed procedure, as well as an illustrative case of this on-going research. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.