Articles

Named entities form the major components in a document. When we catch the fundamental entities, we can understand a document to some degree. This paper employs different types of information from different levels of text to extract named entities, including character conditions, statistic information, titles, punctuation marks, organization and location …...

For MUC-7, BBN has for the first time fielded a fully-trained system for NE, TE, and TR; results are all the output of statistical language models trained on annotated data, rather than programs executing hand- written rules. Such trained systems have some significant advantages: • They can be easily ported …...

This paper proposes a method to extract proper names and their associated information from web pages for Internet/Intranet users automatically. The information extracted from World Wide Web documents includes proper nouns, E-mail addresses and home page URLs. Natural language processing techniques are employed to identify and classify proper nouns, which …...

In this paper we propose using the distributional differences in the syntactic patterns of near-synonyms to deduce the relevant components of verb meaning. Our method involves determining the distributional differences in syntactic patterns, deducing the semantic features from the syntactic phenomena, and testing the semantic features in new syntactic frames. …...

The goal of this paper is to explicate the nature of Chinese nominal semantics, and to create a paradigm for nominal semantics in general that will be useful for natural language processing purposes. We first point out that a lexical item may have two meanings simultaneously, and that current models …...

One of the most prominent problems in computer processing of the Chinese language is identification of the words in a sentence. Since there are no blanks to mark word boundaries, identifying words is difficult because of segmentation ambiguities and occurrences of out-of-vocabulary words (i.e., unknown words). In this paper, a …...

We present an automated method of generating human-readable summaries from a variety of text documents including newspaper articles, business reports, government documents, even broadcast news transcripts. Our approach exploits an em- pirical observation that much of the written text display certain regularities of organization and style, which we call the …...

All of BBN's research under the TIPSTER III program has focused on doing extraction by applying statistical models trained on annotated data, rather than by using programs that execute hand-written rules. Within the context of MUC- 7, the SIFT system for extraction of template entities (TE) and template relations (TR) …...

Information Extraction (IE) systems today are com- monly based on pattern matching. The patterns are regular expressions stored in a customizable knowl- edge base. Adapting an IE system to a new subject domain entails the construction of a new pattern base - - a time-consuming and expensive task. We describe …...

: This paper 1 develops a method for combining query- relevance with information-novelty in the context of text retrieval and summarization. The Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) criterion strives to reduce redundancy while maintaining query relevance in re- ranking retrieved documents and in selecting appropriate passages for text summarization. Preliminary results …...

Automatic summarization and information extraction are two important Internet services. MUC and SUMMAC play their appropriate roles in the next generation Internet. This paper focuses on the automatic summarization and proposes two different models to extract sentences for summary generation under two tasks initiated by SUMMAC-1. For categorization task, positive …...

We investigated both English and Chinese ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Part of our objectives is to study the use of term, phrasal and topical concept level evidence, either individually or in combination, to improve retrieval accuracy. For short queries, we studied five term level techniques that together lead to improvements …...

We discuss those techniques which, in the opinion of the authors, are needed to support robust automatic summarization. Many of these methods are already incorporated in a multi-lingual summarization system, MINDS, developed at CRL. The approach is sentence selection, but includes techniques to improve coherence and also to perform sentence …...

This extended abstract examines the progress of a project on unsupervised language learning, and focuses on two different approaches to segmentation, as well as how cohesion may be generalized from it definitive morpho- syntactic instantiation. It is intended as a discussion paper, and outlines the specific hypotheses currenlty being tested. …...

This paper describes an overview of a method which allows discovery of syntactic structures from untagged corpora. It is composed of three main steps: the discovery of the grammatical morphemes of the language. Then the con- struction of the chunks which axe a multilin- gual conceptual level allowing the bypass …...

This paper presents a language model and its application to sentence structure manip- ulations for various natural language ap- plications including human-computer com- munications. Building a working natural language dialog systems requires the inte- gration of solutions to many of the impor- tant subproblems of natural language pro- cessing. In …...

The Loebner Prize is the first, and only regular, competition based on the Turing Test, but in order to stage the competition various modifications to the original test have been made. In particular, the Grand Prize has a controversial and as yet undefined Audio- Visual condition attached to it. This …...

This paper describes differents methods and tricks in connection with our program which has been entered in the Loebner Prize competition that will happen on Sunday 11 January 1998, at the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney. Of course, this isn't exhaustive, there are other possible techniques but we aim to give …...

Conversation simulators are computer pro- grams which give the appearance of convers- ing with a user in natural language. Alan Turing devised a simple test in order to de- cide whether such programs are intelligent. In 1991, the Cambridge Centre for Behavioural Studies held the first formal instantiation of the …...

In this paper we describe a constraint based formalism that manipulates se- quences of morphological analyses in or- der to Kill, Unify, Replace or Delete parts of the structure. We compare the formalism to a similar approach (CGP) and describe two applications. 1...