| { | |
| "paper_id": "M98-1008", | |
| "header": { | |
| "generated_with": "S2ORC 1.0.0", | |
| "date_generated": "2023-01-19T03:16:27.601594Z" | |
| }, | |
| "title": "Description of the American University in Cairo's System Used for MUC-7", | |
| "authors": [ | |
| { | |
| "first": "Christian", | |
| "middle": [ | |
| "R" | |
| ], | |
| "last": "Huyck", | |
| "suffix": "", | |
| "affiliation": { | |
| "laboratory": "", | |
| "institution": "The American University", | |
| "location": { | |
| "settlement": "Cairo" | |
| } | |
| }, | |
| "email": "[email protected]" | |
| } | |
| ], | |
| "year": "", | |
| "venue": null, | |
| "identifiers": {}, | |
| "abstract": "", | |
| "pdf_parse": { | |
| "paper_id": "M98-1008", | |
| "_pdf_hash": "", | |
| "abstract": [], | |
| "body_text": [ | |
| { | |
| "text": "Portions of the American University in Cairo's MUC-7 system, MUC7-Plink, have participated in every Message Understanding Competition since MUC-4. The Plink parser was developed at the University of Michigan where it formed the core of the systems entered in MUC-4 2 and MUC-5 1 . Recently, the Plink parser was added to GATE 6 to facilitate interaction between language processing modules. Most of the modules used in MUC7-Plink were already in GATE having been imported from the LaSIE system used in MUC- 6 8 . GATE provides an environment that greatly simpli es the reuse of existing natural language models. When the call for participation in MUC-7 was made, I was a faculty memberat the American University in Cairo, and had several students who were considering participating along with me in MUC-7. I could have easily divided the tasks and had, for instance, one student work on the Gazetteer, one work on coreference and perhaps a small group work on discourse interpretation. Along with the existing Plink parser this would have comprised a largely new system. Unfortunately, I left Cairo, and had only a very small amount of time to develop the system. Furthermore, I had to develop the system at home on my PC. Fortunately, GATE already had all of the modules that I needed, and ran albeit slowly on my PC. I did have to modify some things, but with a very small amount of e ort, I developed a working MUC-7 system. Sadly, due to the lack of resources, the results of the system were poor, and by no means re ect the ceiling of the technology. They do however show h o w easy it is to perform relatively well with virtually no development time.", | |
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| "start": 507, | |
| "end": 512, | |
| "text": "6 8 .", | |
| "ref_id": null | |
| } | |
| ], | |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The MUC7-Plink system is largely that of the She eld system. It di ers largely by the use of an on-line lexicon, and the use of a di erent parser. This parser was used for the University of Michigan's MUC-5 entry, but the grammar and parsing heuristics have been rewritten to take advantage of the on-line lexicon, the Gazetteer, and the automated part of speech tagger. The parser also produces signi cantly di erent output for the XI discourse interpreter 17 .", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "In the rest of this document I will rst describe the system; this will include a module by module description of the components, and a brief description of GATE. I will then describe the performance of the system; this will include a summary of MUC7-Plink's scores on the TE, TR and ST tasks, a brief summary of how development time was spent, and a walk through of the sample article. I will conclude with a few observations.", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The MUC7-Plink system was composed of ten modules which w ere run in succession on each text. In order, they were: Eight of these modules were used in the She eld MUC-7 entry. The only ones that were substantially di erent w ere the Lexicon and the Parser. I will brie y summarize the others and give a more expansive description of the Lexicon and the Plink parser.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "SYSTEM DESCRIPTION Architecture Overview", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The tokenizer reads the input stream and segments it into small chunks that are roughly equivalent t o w ords. It is an executable le compiled from a C program; the C program is generated from a Lex 10 input le. The token is the most commonly used unit of data for processing in GATE, and the tokenizer guarantees a somewhat uniform representation. These tokens are added to the GATE database; a separate database is maintained for each document. Additionally the tokenizer adds section annotations to mark areas of the text.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "tokenizer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Each of the GATE annotations have a start and end byte which de ne a span. The span speci es the o set in the document to which the annotation applies. So, the token associated with Ford\" might h a v e the span of byte 152 to 156, while a section might have the span of 0 and 562. Additional annotation speci c information might be added to each annotation.", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "tokenizer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The sentence splitter is a perl script which notes the sentence boundaries. These boundaries are added as annotations into the GATE database; the annotation includes the o set of the sentence in the document the span and all of the tokens which are constituents of the sentence.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "sentence splitter", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The Brill tagger 3 is a part of speech tagger that has been extensively trained on Wall Street Journal Text. It annotates tokens with their part of speech. Since an annotation already exists for each token, more information is simply added to each token annotation thus consolidating information.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "tagger", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "These parts of speech are not entirely compatible with the results of the Gazetteer or the Lexicon. These con icts are resolved before parsing begins.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "tagger", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The majority of nominal semantics in the system comes from the Gazetteer. It is a Lex 10 based system of 44 lists. Each list represents a di erent semantic category. The lists include companies, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, cities, provinces, titles, rst names, bodies of water and aircraft names among many other things. There are about 200,000 bytes of text in the lists making roughly 10,000 entries. The system is relatively easy to modify. Addition of new elements to the list is simple, and the addition of a new list is also simple.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "gazetteer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "In addition to lists of proper names, some are lists of key words that signal certain semantic categories. For instance there is a list of organization signal words such as University, Hospital and Laboratory. These words alone are not su cient to mark an organization, but if they occur next to an unknown proper noun they suggest that that proper noun is an organization. This adjacency, and thus categorization, is noted in the parser.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "gazetteer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The Gazetteer was largely the one used in the She eld system. However, near the end of development, I had to freeze the lists while they were slightly modi ed at She eld. In general this did not matter, but a large numberof launch event speci c changes were not completely incorporated. The largest problem here was that spacecraft were not incorporated. Since rockets were needed for the scenario template task, virtually no scenario templates were generated. GATE is not a strictly linear system. Module A must berun before Module B when B needs information from A. However, if neither is dependent on the other they can be run independently. 1 Since the Gazetteer does not depend on morphological analysis, it could be run before or after the tagger.", | |
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| { | |
| "start": 645, | |
| "end": 646, | |
| "text": "1", | |
| "ref_id": "BIBREF0" | |
| } | |
| ], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "gazetteer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The morphological analyzer takes all nouns and verbs and returns the root form and the su x. The root form is often used as a semantic primitive. So the semantics for report\" is the same as the semantics for reports\" or reporting\". The analysis is done by some regular expression rules and a list of several thousand irregular exceptions derived from the exception list used in Wordnet 16 .", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "morphological analyzer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The version of Plink used for MUC-4 and MUC-5 had a hand-crafted lexicon. Each lexical entry Theoretically, independent modules can be run in parallel, but the current G A TE system does not implement this feature. was a complex feature structure, and was rather di cult to construct. Words that were not speci cally in the lexicon were assumed to be proper nouns of no particular semantic category. It would be more e ective if an on-line lexicon could be used to reduce the work load because the lexicon would both ease transition to a new domain, and reduce the time need to maintain Plink's own lexicon.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "lexicon", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English LDOCE 9 has electronic versions. One of these versions was selected, and added to GATE. The desired word root form was passed to LDOCE and it returned the de nitions of the word that it found. Each of these de nitions were added as there own tokens to the GATE database, with spans that corresponded to the token.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "lexicon", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Initially, each de nition of the word was left in as an annotation. Plink was allowed to choose between the de nitions. Unfortunately, on medium size documents the large numberoflexical entries tended to slow my machine down due to memory limitations. This meant that some pruning had to be done before addition to the GATE database.", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "lexicon", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The Plink grammar that I developed roughly follows the HPSG 14 formalism. This requires rather sophisticated lexical entries. The addition of LDOCE has enabled me to begin to develop a more complex lexical system. Eventually, these de nitions will include semantic and complex syntactic features which should enable more e ective parsing, and more useful semantic results which can be passed along to discourse analysis.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "lexicon", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The version of LDOCE that I used has semantics and selectional restrictions, but they seem to be inconsistently entered. Thus the information gathered from LDOCE is currently not very useful.", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "lexicon", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The PLINK parser was designed for the fth Message Understanding Competition ARPA-93. PLINK does full edged parsing creating exactly one syntactic-semantic representation of a given sentence. Additionally, PLINK parses in linear time thus speeding parsing. PLINK is closely related to the Marcus parser 13 using a stack of constituents. Plink uses a heuristic rule selection mechanism based on the contents of the stack to select which grammar rule to apply at each step. These heuristics have access to elements of the partially completed parse and select the rules based on a preference mechanism. The preferential mechanism is based on a small number of rankings currently 6, so the system can select several rules and rank them.", | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "PLINK uses a standard-uni cation based grammar or UBG 15 , and is derived from the LINK parser 11 . The use of a UBG enables PLINK to encode grammar rules that have both syntactic and semantic components. Since the parser has access to syntax and semantics, it can take advantage of both types of knowledge to make parsing decisions. This allows parsing to proceed in one-pass and eliminate a great deal of ambiguity. PLINK also includes an inheritance hierarchy of semantic components. A more thorough discussion of PLINK and the MUC-5 system can be found in 7 .", | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "The grammar that was used was hand-crafted. Though it does not adhere to any speci c linguistic theory, it is similar to the HPSG grammar of Pollard and Sag 14 . The grammar rules are quite standard except in many cases they are more amenable to one-pass parsing. For instance left-recursion is avoided. These rules still recognize the same language, but some gram-matical manipulation improves one-pass parsing. Rules to handle agrammatical phenomenon were derived with HPSG in mind, though of course, they di er from standard HPSG rules.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The parsing model is based around a stack and selection rules. The stack is a standard parsing stack. Constituents were added to the stack, and when appropriate a grammar rule was applied to the stack modifying the top elements of the stack. I tried to keep the stack small, and in earlier experiments the stack never exceeded a size of seven constituents when it was parsing grammatical phenomena.", | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| "text": "At any given time a numberof actions could take place. A new element could bepushed onto the stack or one of a number of grammar rules could be applied. Selection rules were used to choose the next action. Like the grammar rules themselves, the selection rules are themselves UBG rules. The selection rules inspect the stack, and give a preference weighting to each of the valid options. For example:", | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
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| { | |
| "text": "... det noun period", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "plink", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "Here \"...\" represents other elements lower on the stack and period the punctuation mark represents the most recently added element. All of the selection rules are uni ed with the stack and for the sake of example two selection rules match.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "Example 1. A Sample Stack", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Selection-Rule 1 good NP-from-det-noun best abbrev-eats-period 1 = det 1 = noun 2 = noun 2 = period 3 = nil Example 2. Selection Rules that Match the same stack.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "Selection-Rule 1", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "If the NP-from-det-noun rule was applied the stack w ould be changed to ...", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "Selection-Rule 1", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "If the abbrev-eats-period abbreviation absorbs a period rule was applied the stack would bechanged to:", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "NP period Example 3. Stack If the First Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "...", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "NP period Example 3. Stack If the First Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Which of the two rules is actually selected? Grammar rules are selected based on a preference ranking. In the current system the ranking is best, good, fair, last, spec-agram and gen-agram. The best rule is applied rst. When the stack is as it is in example 1, the abbrev-eats-period rule is applied rst. If it succeeds a new round of rule selection begins. If it fails, then rules from the next level, in this case NP-from-det-noun are applied. This continues until all rules fail. If multiple grammar rules are selected with the same preference ranking, then they are ordered randomly.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "If no rule succeeds a new constituent is pushed onto the stack. This is could be implemented by the selection rule: Selection-Rule 1 gen-agram push This rule always succeeds and the keyword push is used to push a constituent o n to the stack. Other selection rules may take advantage of the push mechanism, when more lexical information is needed to make a parsing decision.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "This parsing mechanism allows no backtracking. Consequently, this assures that the parse occurs in linear time. There is evidence that humans backtrack when parsing 4 , 5 . In this sense PLINK is not a full-edged model of human parsing.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "In example 2, I actually speci ed the names NP-from-det-noun and abbrev-eats-period. This is the actual name of the grammar rule; that is the selection rules actually encode the grammar rule by name. The name of the grammar rule is speci ed in the grammar rules pref name feature. The grammar rule for NP-from-det-noun looks like example 5. The MUC-7 domain is an open ended domain of newspaper articles. These articles often have grammatical and spelling errors. Furthermore, the lexical mechanisms are not always correct. For example, occasionally words are mis-tagged. Consequently, the domain is ideal for robust parsing techniques. The simple technique that PLINK uses for robustness is low ranked rules. High priority rules handle grammatical and speci c phenomena; medium priority rules handle grammatical and general phenomena; low priority rules handle agrammatical phenomenon.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "A working version of the Plink parser existed by the time of the dry run. The parser was in GATE, and was receiving input from earlier modules via the GATE database. However, the grammar was designed to recognize general noun phrases. Some modi cations had to be made to generate the appropriate semantic category. For instance, the parser might encounter Robert R. Smith\". This would be correctly recognized as an NP, but it would not state that it was a person. For the purposes of all of the MUC tasks, this information was needed. Consequently, new grammar rules had to beadded. Since Robert is in the Gazetteer, the semantic type of Robert\" would be person and an NP formed from it would also be person. However, the type of R.\" and Smith\" would be unknown. Thus a grammar rule Example 6. was needed. . of course con icted with an already existing grammar rule which took the exact same constituents, but took the semantics from the second noun. A higher ranking parsing heuristic was made for the ng-from-NGperson-N grammar rule and it was always selected rst. It only succeeded when the semantics were correct, so non-person NPs were una ected.", | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "A total of 11 grammar rules, and 13 selectional rules were added for the MUC task. All of these were developed during the training phase and were thus specialized for the aircraft accident domain. It would be valid to say that this was the only work done on MUC7-Plink for MUC-7. These rules were written in a few hours over several afternoons. One of the advantages of the Plink approach is the simple integration of domain speci c grammar rules.", | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
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| "text": "The main modi cations from the MUC-5 system were a new grammar for a new tag set, and the introduction of lazy uni cation to speed heuristic rule selection. The new grammar was needed since the tag set had changed. The MUC-5 tag set was speci c to our hand-crafted lexicon. It now uses a combination of the tags used by the Brill tagger, the Gazetteer, and LDOCE. This has been combined with a hierarchy o f s y n tactic classes, to enable more general rules to be written. For example, instead of one syntactic class for comma, and one for each o f the other punctuations, I have combined this into symbol, but each symbol has a head feature which is the symbol. A general rule can be written to look at the lexical class`sym', or a speci c rule can bewritten to look at the lexical class`sym' which has a head feature dollar for the dollar sign.", | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| "text": "Lazy uni cation is now used during rule selection. In the MUC-5 system full uni cation was used, and this lead to large structures being built unnecessarily. A future improvement would introduce lazy uni cation into grammar rule application. There is evidence that this would further improve parsing performance 12 .", | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "Finally, a great deal of modi cation was needed to produce the correct input for the XI discourse interpreter. Fortunately, this was mostly a matter of post-processing. Plink standardly produces a list of verb frames. XI wants a list of quasi-logical predicates. It is relatively simple to change the frames into predicates. However, the XI system that was used needed a certain set of predicates. A large amount o f w ork was needed to assure that the correct predicates were being produced. This is where the majority of work for MUC7-Plink happened. What was produced was a list of entities and relations between entities. The entities could bebased on nouns or on verbs.", | |
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| "section": "NP period Example 4. Stack If the Second Rule is Successfully Applied", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "This is a C++ program used as part of the coreference mechanism. If a name, or part of name, occurs in the list of entities, they are combined into one entity. This is a useful preprocessing step for the Discourse Interpreter.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "name matcher", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The discourse interpreter was developed using the XI knowledge representation language 17 . The input to the interpreter was a series of entities and relations between entities. The interpreter had rules which built new relations and reclassi ed the entities. One particular important set of entities and relations was the MUC-7 speci c Element, Relations and Scenarios.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "discourse interpreter", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The only work done for MUC7-Plink was to produce the appropriate input for the discourse interpreter. Unfortunately, this work was incomplete, particularly for the nal test domain. This lead to very low recall measures in all three tasks.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "discourse interpreter", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "An additional problem was that the coreference mechanism, which w as largely implemented in the discourse interpreter, assumed that entities had a particular property. However, this relation was added by the Plink parser. This lead to a reduction in precision particularly in the Template Element task because entities that corefered in reality w ere not associated by discourse interpretation.", | |
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| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "discourse interpreter", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The template writer is a prolog program that simply scans through the discourse model. It looks for certain types of entities and relations, formats the information for them in an appropriate manner, and generates the templates which are the results of the system.", | |
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| "section": "template writer", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "This whole system was developed as a system of the General Architecture for Text Engineering or GATE 6 . Text processing modules are added to GATE, and these modules can be combined into a system. Once modules are added they can becombined in di erent ways to form new systems.", | |
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| "section": "General Architecture for Text Engineering", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| "text": "GATE provides a Tipster compatible database mechanism. The database store is organized around documents. Each document has its own set of annotations. Modules take input from the database, process the input, and generate output which is then usually placed into the database.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "General Architecture for Text Engineering", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| "text": "The simplest way to add a new module to GATE is by writing a wrapper that interacts directly with the database. The wrapper gets annotations from the database and writes it to a le; the code for the module is then called with the le as input. It then produces an output le which is read by the wrapper and put into the database. Some modules, such as the name matcher, do not communicate this way. However, integrating a module in this fashion is not very di cult, and it allows the module to run without GATE if an input le exists. GATE currently has about 40 modules with complete wrappers. Addition of a new module varies in complexity, but can bedone in well under an hour for simple systems, and in 2 days for complex systems such as the ANLT parser. Since processing can be independent o f G A TE, the source language of the new module is irrelevant. MUC7-Plink has modules written in C, C derived from Lex, C++, Lisp, Perl and Prolog. Table 1 . System Results MUC7-Plink generated scores for the Scenario task, the Template Relations task and the Template Element task. The scores were lower than expected, but not much lower. No development w as done on the Launch E v ent domain. A small amount o f w ork could have raised the P&R scores to 20 for ST, 40 for TR, and 60 for TE; these are roughly the scores on the tasks in the Aircraft Accident domain on texts that were run blindly. Of course a reasonable amount o f w ork on the system could have raised the scores much higher.", | |
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| { | |
| "start": 942, | |
| "end": 949, | |
| "text": "Table 1", | |
| "ref_id": null | |
| } | |
| ], | |
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| "section": "General Architecture for Text Engineering", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The only way that MUC7-Plink excelled for the MUC-7 competition was development time. No time was spent on the Launch Event domain, and very little time was spent on the Aircraft Accident domain. A summary of the time spent in development is below.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| "text": "15 hours development on Aircraft Accidents 0 hours development on Launch E v ents 9 48 hours on integration into the GATE LaSIE Discourse Interpreter 80 hours spent adding Plink and LDOCE to GATE 90 hours running the nal test There was no time spent o n development in the nal test domain. The TE and TR scores are reasonable because some time was spent in development on the similar training domain of Aircraft Accidents. 48 hours was spent on modifying the output of the Plink parser to t with the XI discourse interpreter that was used. This could reasonably be considered part of the MUC-7 e ort. Roughly 80 hours were spent in adding Plink and LDOCE to GATE, in the summer of 1996. The integration process has been improved since then, and adding two similar modules would probably take under 40 hours e ort.", | |
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| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "The majority of the time was spent on running the nal tests. I w as running on a PC-586 at 90 MHz, with 16 Meg of RAM. This lead to very slow processing. The longest article took over 6 hours to process. An average article to 30 minutes to process up to the discourse interpreter. 10 minutes was spent on parsing, and 5 minutes was spent on lexical lookup. Roughly 10 minutes of the remaining time was spent i n terfacing with the GATE database. This is clearly a weakness of the GATE model and needs to be improved.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "Discourse analysis was taking much too long, and there would have been no way to run all of the texts on my PC. Fortunately the GATE approach of reading from the database, writing to a le and then calling the module was very helpful; it enabled me to write input les for the discourse interpreter, ftp them to a Sun workstation and run them there. Roughly half of the texts were run this way, and almost all of the texts over 4000 bytes.", | |
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| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "The major problem with this long running time was that it left no time for development o n the Launch Event domain. An overnight run of texts would have enabled development of the MUC7-Plink system to have m uch higher results. Still it is quite remarkable that one can enter MUC-7 on a system almost solely run and developed on a low-end PC. Walkthrough I will concentrate on the sentence The China Great Wall Industry Corp. provided the Long March 3B rocket for today's failed launch of a satellite built by Loral Corp. of New York for Intelsat. \"", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The tokenizer reads in the text and adds annotations like: 206 token 1118 1121 207 token 1122 1127 for the words The and China. 206 refers to the annotation number, and 1118 and 1121 is the span of the token in the text.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The sentence splitter divided the document into sentences including the above sentence as the annotation: 1139 sentence 1118 1275 constituents: 206 207 .... This annotation says it is a sentence that goes from 1118 to 1275 and has the tokens 206, 207 etc.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "Development Time", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The tagger modi es the token annotations by adding part of speech information. 206 token 1118 1121 pos: DT 207 token 1122 1127 pos: NNP The Gazetteer looks up words and nds among others: 5007 Lookup 1253 1259 tag: location type:city 5008 Lookup 1244 1249 tag: organization type:company for New York, and Loral respectively. Note that New York does span two tokens, thus Lookup can not be directly associated with tokens in the database.", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The morphological analyzer adds root and su x annotations to verbs and nouns. 231 token 1235 1240 pos: VBD root: build a x: ed 232 token 1244 1249 pos: NNP root: loral a x: are the annotations for built and Loral. LDOCE looks up words and adds rather complex annotations. An example is: 6428 ldoce entry 1172 1177 homograph: 0 sense: 0 part of speech:grammar info: -subject code: -case info:for the word March. As noted this information is not currently very useful but slots are left open for a more e ective lexical retrieval mechanism.", | |
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| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The Plink Parser is then run on the sentence and generates a syntactic structure for the sentence, which w e will ignore, and a semantic structure for the sentence. The annotation is: 7867 semantics 1118 1275 qlf: faile251, lobje251,e252, launche252 ....", | |
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| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The quasi-logical forms that are of interest are: organizatione256, namee256, o set1244, 1255, citye257, namee257, 'new york', apposede256,e257, ofe256,e257 This says that Loral Corp. is an organization which has an of relation with the city New York.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "In this particular text, the name matcher nds no matches.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "The discourse interpreter nds an of relation between an organization and a location. The interpreter has a rule that adds a location of predicate if this relation holds so a new predicate location ofe256,e257 is added. The discourse interpreter in turn writes information back to the database. An example is: 8132 xi instance 1118 1275 class: e7 city props: location ofe6,e7, countrye7, 'United States', ofe6,e7... The template writer reads these xi instance annotations and prints the appropriate template elements and relations for in this case, Loral Corp. and New York. OBSERVATIONS GATE made MUC7-Plink possible. Without GATE it would have been impossible for me to develop a system capable of participating in MUC in under a few weeks of work. GATE does have some weaknesses: adding a new module to GATE while simple is not transparent; accessing the database is quite slow. However, it has been a very useful development e n vironment.", | |
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| "sec_num": null | |
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| { | |
| "text": "Plink has also shown to be quite useful. It was quite easy to add new rules for a new domain to Plink. The end result of parsing is easily translated into the quasi-logical form needed by the discourse interpreter. This comes from it being a full-parser which generates one interpretation, and generates a full semantic interpretation along with a syntactic one.", | |
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| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "MUC7-Plink can be most usefully seen as an example of how to build a system that can very easily be moved to a new domain. Assuming a working system, for say the MUC-6 Succession Event task, three main modules need to be modi ed: the Gazetteer, the Parser and the Discourse Interpreter. Using the modules in MUC7-Plink only domain speci c data needs to be changed and the actual programs remain constant.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
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| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "The Gazetteer needed several lists changed. The parser needed to add several grammar rules, and for Plink selection rules, to account for the lists. Switching to a new domain would again call for new lists and new grammar rules. However, this data is all based around Noun Phrases. The NE task requires the system to classify several Named Entities. If there was a more di cult task, an Entity task, which required all Entities to be classi ed, the system would bemore domain independent. It would still beuseful to add new lists and grammar rules to switch domains, but the introductory work would have been done. Furthermore, without adding new lists or grammar rules, some output could be generated.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "For example, in switching MUC7-Plink from Aircraft Accidents to Launch E v ents the grammar and the Gazetteer provided no space for rockets. Therefore, rockets could never have arrived as speci c semantic output except when speci cally mentioned as a rocket. This is why MUC7-Plink performed so badly on the ST task. It performed better on the TE and TR task because large parts of those tasks Organizations, Products and People were accounted for by the grammar and the Gazetteer. If the original system had considered rocket entities, the scores would have been much higher.", | |
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| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "10", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| }, | |
| { | |
| "text": "Marcus, Mitchell P. 1980 A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 14 Pollard, C. and I. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure G r ammar Standford, CA:Center for the Study of Language an Information. 15 Shieber, Stuart M. 1986 An Introduction to Uni cation-Based Approaches to Grammar Stanford, CA:Center for the Study of Language an Information. 16 Miller, G. 1990. Wordnet: An on-line lexical database International Journal of Lexicography, 34. 17 Gaizauskas. R. 1995. XI: A knowledge representation language based on cross-classi cation and inheritance. Research Memorandum CS-95-24, Dept. of Computer Science, University of She eld.", | |
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| "sec_num": null | |
| } | |
| ], | |
| "back_matter": [ | |
| { | |
| "text": "There was no Discourse Interpretation work done as part of MUC7-Plink. I simply took advantage of the work done at She eld. Clearly, in switching to a new domain, some discourse work would need to bedone. However, the amount of work done at She eld on the discourse model was also small. To a large degree this work could be considered looking for speci c phenomenon in the text, speci cally, those phenomena required by the ST, and TR tasks. Perhaps the new SUMMAC tests will provide better insight i n to a general discourse interpretation mechanism which can easily be culled for speci c information, but it seems likely a more sophisticated all-purpose Scenario task would be needed.", | |
| "cite_spans": [], | |
| "ref_spans": [], | |
| "eq_spans": [], | |
| "section": "acknowledgement", | |
| "sec_num": null | |
| } | |
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| "text": "type = common pref name = NP-from-det-noun Example 5. A Sample Grammar Rule 6", | |
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