The traditional entity extraction problem lies in the ability of extracting named entities from plain text using natural language processing techniques and intensive training from large document collections. Examples of named entities include organisations, people, locations, or dates. There are many research activities involving named entities; we are interested in entity ranking in the field of information retrieval. In this paper, we describe our approach to identifying and ranking entities from the INEX Wikipedia document collection. Wikipedia offers a number of interesting features for entity identification and ranking that we first introduce. We then describe the principles and the architecture of our entity ranking system, and introduce our methodology for evaluation. Our preliminary results show that the use of categories and the link structure of Wikipedia, together with entity examples, can significantly improve retrieval effectiveness.
We consider the problem of improving named entity recognition (NER) systems by using external dictionaries---more specifically, the problem of extending state-of-the-art NER systems by incorporating information about the similarity of extracted entities to entities in an external dictionary. This is difficult because most high-performance named entity recognition systems operate by sequentially classifying words as to whether or not they participate in an entity name; however, the most useful similarity measures score entire candidate names. To correct this mismatch we formalize a semi-Markov extraction process, which is based on sequentially classifying segments of several adjacent words, rather than single words. In addition to allowing a natural way of coupling high-performance NER methods and high-performance similarity functions, this formalism also allows the direct use of other useful entity-level features, and provides a more natural formulation of the NER problem than sequential word classification. Experiments in multiple domains show that the new model can substantially improve extraction performance over previous methods for using external dictionaries in NER. The approach towards Semantic Web Information Extraction (IE) presented here is implemented in KIM – a platform for semantic indexing, annotation, and retrieval. It combines IE based on the mature text engineering platform (GATE1) with Semantic Web-compliant knowledge representation and management. The cornerstone is automatic generation of named-entity (NE) annotations with class and instance references to a semantic repository. Simplistic upper-level ontology, providing detailed coverage of the most popular entity types (Person, Organization, Location, etc.; more than 250 classes) is designed and used. A knowledge base (KB) with de-facto exhaustive coverage of real-world entities of general importance is maintained, used, and constantly enriched. Extensions of the ontology and KB take care of handling all the lexical resources used for IE, most notable, instead of gazetteer lists, aliases of specific entities are kept together with them in the KB. A Semantic Gazetteer uses the KB to generate lookup annotations. Ontologyaware pattern-matching grammars allow precise class information to be handled via rules at the optimal level of generality. The grammars are used to recognize NE, with class and instance information referring to the KIM ontology and KB. Recognition of identity relations between the entities is used to unify their references to the KB. Based on the recognized NE, template relation construction is performed via grammar rules. As a result of the latter, the KB is being enriched with the recognized relations between entities. At the final phase of the IE process, previously unknown aliases and entities are being added to the KB with their specific types. Cet article presente un systeme automatique d'annotation semantique de pages web. Les systemes d'annotation automatique existants sont essentiellement syntaxiques, meme lorsque les travaux visent a produire une annotation semantique. La prise en compte d'informations semantiques sur le domaine pour l'annotation d'un element dans une page web a partir d'une ontologie suppose d'aborder conjointement deux problemes : (1) l'identification de la structure syntaxique caracterisant cet element dans la page web et (2) l'identification du concept le plus specifique (en termes de subsumption) dans l'ontologie dont l'instance sera utilisee pour annoter cet element. Notre demarche repose sur la mise en oeuvre d'une technique d'apprentissage issue initialement des wrappers que nous avons articulee avec des raisonnements exploitant la structure formelle de l'ontologie.