Automatic Analysis of Descriptive Texts

AUTOMATIC ANALYSIS OF DESCRIPTIVE TEXTS James R. Cowls Computer Centre University of Strathclyde, Royal College, George Street, Glasgow, GI IXI~. SCOTLAND ABSTRACT This paper describes a system that attempts to interpret descriptive texts without the uJe of complex grammars. The purpose of the system is to transform the descriptions to a standard form which may be used as the basis of a database sys- tem knowledgeable in the subject matter of the teXt. The texts currently used are wild plant descriptions taken directly from a popular book on the subject. Properties such as size, shape and colour are abstracted from the descriptions and related to parts of the plant in which we are interested. The resulting output is a standar- dined hierarchical structure holding only signi- ficant features of the description. The system, implemented in the PROLOG pro- gramming language, uses keywords co identify the way segments of the text relate to the object described. Information on words is held in a keyword list of nouns relating to parts of the object described. A dictionary contains the at- tributes of ordinary words used by the system to analyse the text. The text is divided into seE" ments using information provided by conjunctions and punctuation. About half the texts processed are correct- ly analysed at present. Proposals are made for future work to improve this figure. There seems Co be no inherent reason why the technique cannot be generalised so chac any text of seml-standard descriptions can be automatically converted to a canonical form. I INTRODUCTION A lot of useful information, covering many subject areas, is presently available in printed form in catalogues, directories and guides. Good" examples are plants in "Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers", aeroplanes in "Jane's All the World's Aircraft" and people in '~ho's Who". Be- cause chls informaClon is represented in a styl- ised form, it is amenable CO machine processing Co abstract salient details concerning the entity being described. The research described here is part of a long term project to develop a system which can "read" descriptive text and so become an expert on the -~terial which has been read. The first stage of this research is to es- tablish that it is indeed possible co abstract useful information from descriptive text and we have chosen as a typical example a text consist- ing of descriptions of wild plants. Our system reade this text and generates a formal canonical plant description. Ultimately this will be in- put to a knowledse-baeed system which will then be able to answer questions on wild plants. The paper gives a limited overview of the recent work in text analysis in order to estab- lish a context for the approach we adopt. An outline of the operation of the system is then nadeo The analysis of our text proceeds in four separate stages and these are considered in con- Junction with a sample text. The first stage at- Caches to each word in the text attributes which are held …

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