Automatically Acquiring Conceptual Patterns without an Annotated Corpus.
Ellen Riloff, Jay Shoen · 1995
Previous work on automated dictionary construction for information extraction has relied on annotated text corpora. However, annotating a corpus is time-consuming and difficult. We propose that conceptual patterns for information extraction can be acquired automatically using only a preclassified training corpus and no text annotations. We describe a system called AutoSlog-TS, which is a variation of our previous AutoSlog system, that runs exhaustively on an untagged text corpus. Text classification experiments in the MUC-4 terrorism domain show that the AutoSlog-TS dictionary performs comparably to a hand-crafted dictionary, and actually achieves higher precision on one test set. For text classification, AutoSlog-TS requires no manual effort beyond the preclassified training corpus. Additional experiments suggest how a dictionary produced by AutoSlog-TS can be filtered automatically for information extraction tasks. Some manual intervention is still required in this case, bu...