Extreme extraction - Machine reading in a week

Abstract

We report on empirical results in extreme extraction. It is extreme in that (1) from receipt of the ontology specifying the target concepts and relations, development is limited to one week and that (2) relatively little training data is assumed. We are able to surpass human recall and achieve an F1 of 0.51 on a question-answering task with less than 50 hours of effort using a hybrid approach that mixes active learning, bootstrapping, and limited (5 hours) manual rule writing. We compare the performance of three systems: extraction with handwritten rules, bootstrapped extraction, and a combination. We show that while the recall of the handwritten rules surpasses that of the learned system, the learned system is able to improve the overall recall and F1. © 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics.