Object-oriented knowledge representation in a natural language understanding system of economic surveys
Jean-Christophe Planes, Philippe Trigano · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1992
The HIRONDELLE research project of the Banque de France intends to summarize economic surveys giving statements about a specific economic domain. The principal goal is the detection of causal relations between economic events appearing in the texts. We will focus on knowledge representation, based on three distinct hierarchical structures. The first one concerns the lexical items and allows inheritance of syntactic properties. Descriptions of the applications domains are achieved by a taxonomy based on attribute-value models and case relations, adapted to the economic sectors. The summarization goal of this system defines a set of primitives representing statements and causality meta-language. The semantic analysis of the texts is based on two phases. The first one leads to a propositional representation of the sentences through conceptual graphs formalization, taking into account the syntactic transformations of sentences. The second one is dedicated to the summarizing role of the system, detecting paraphrastic sentences by processing syntactic and semantic transformations like negation or metonymious constructions.