Natural language processing for online applications: text retrieval, extraction and categorization

237 Pages·2002·1.283 MB·Natural Language Planning

by  Peter Jackson, Isabelle Moulinier

NaturalLanguageProcessingforOnlineApplications
Natural Language Processing
Editor
Prof.RuslanMitkov
SchoolofHumanities,LanguagesandSocialSciences
UniversityofWolverhampton
StaffordSt.
WolverhamptonWV11SB,UnitedKingdom
Email:[e-mail]
AdvisoryBoard
ChristianBoitet(UniversityofGrenoble)
JohnCarroll(UniversityofSussex,Brighton)
EugeneCharniak(BrownUniversity,Providence)
EduardHovy(InformationSciencesInstitute,USC)
RichardKittredge(UniversityofMontreal)
GeoffreyLeech(LancasterUniversity)
CarlosMartin-Vide(RoviraiVirgiliUn.,Tarragona)
AndreiMikheev(UniversityofEdinburgh)
JohnNerbonne(UniversityofGroningen)
NicolasNicolov(IBM,T.J.WatsonResearchCenter)
KemalOflazer(SabanciUniversity)
AllanRamsey(UMIST,Manchester)
MoniqueRolbert(UniversitédeMarseille)
RichardSproat(AT&TLabs Research,FlorhamPark)
Keh-YihSu(BehaviourDesignCorp.)
IsabelleTrancoso(INESC,Lisbon)
BenjaminTsou(CityUniversityofHongKong)
Jun-ichiTsujii(UniversityofTokyo)
EvelyneTzoukermann(BellLaboratories,MurrayHill)
YorickWilks(UniversityofSheffield)
Volume5
Natural Language Processing for Online Applications: Text Retrieval,
ExtractionandCategorization
byPeterJacksonandIsabelleMoulinier
Natural Language Processing
for Online Applications
Text Retrieval,
Extraction and Categorization
Peter Jackson
Isabelle Moulinier
ThomsonLegal&Regulatory
JohnBenjaminsPublishingCompany
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM ThepaperusedinthispublicationmeetstheminimumrequirementsofAmerican
8
NationalStandardforInformationSciences–PermanenceofPaperforPrinted
LibraryMaterials,ansiz39.48-1984.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Jackson,Peter,1948-
Natural language processing for online applications : text retrieval, extraction, and
categorization/PeterJackson,IsabelleMoulinier.
p. cm.(NaturalLanguageProcessing,issn1567–8202;v.5)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
I.Jackson,Peter.II.Moulinier,Isabelle.III.Title.IV.Series.
QA76.9.N38 I33 2002
006.3’5--dc21 2002066539
isbn902724988(cid:2)1(Eur.)/158811249(cid:2)7(US)(Hb;alk.paper)
isbn902724989(cid:2)X(Eur.)/158811250(cid:2)0(US)(Pb;alk.paper)
©2002–JohnBenjaminsB.V.
Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyform,byprint,photoprint,microfilm,orany
othermeans,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthepublisher.
JohnBenjaminsPublishingCo.·P.O.Box36224·1020meAmsterdam·TheNetherlands
JohnBenjaminsNorthAmerica·P.O.Box27519·Philadelphiapa19118-0519·usa
Table of contents
Preface 
C1
Naturallanguageprocessing 
. WhatisNLP? 
. NLPandlinguistics 
.. Syntaxandsemantics 
.. Pragmaticsandcontext 
.. TwoviewsofNLP 
.. Tasksandsupertasks 
. Linguistictools 
.. Sentencedelimitersandtokenizers 
.. Stemmersandtaggers 
.. Nounphraseandnamerecognizers 
.. Parsersandgrammars 
. Planofthebook 
C2
Documentretrieval 
. Informationretrieval 
. Indexingtechnology 
. Queryprocessing 
.. Booleansearch 
.. Rankedretrieval 
.. Probabilisticretrieval 
.. Languagemodeling 
. Evaluatingsearchengines 
.. Evaluationstudies 
.. Evaluationmetrics 
.. Relevancejudgments 
.. Totalsystemevaluation 
. Attemptstoenhancesearchperformance 
 Tableofcontents
.. Queryexpansionandthesauri 
.. Queryexpansionfromrelevanceinformation* 
. ThefutureofWebsearching 
.. IndexingtheWeb 
.. SearchingtheWeb 
.. Rankingandrerankingdocuments 
.. Thestateofonlinesearch 
. Summaryofinformationretrieval 
C3
Informationextraction 
. TheMessageUnderstandingConferences 
. Regularexpressions 
. FiniteautomatainFASTUS 
.. FiniteStateMachinesandregularlanguages 
.. FiniteStateMachinesasparsers 
. Pushdownautomataandcontext-freegrammars 
.. Analyzingcasereports 
.. Contextfreegrammars 
.. Parsingwithapushdownautomaton 
.. Copingwithincompletenessandambiguity 
. Limitationsofcurrenttechnologyandfutureresearch 
.. Explicitversusimplicitstatements 
.. Machinelearningforinformationextraction 
.. Statisticallanguagemodelsforinformationextraction 
. Summaryofinformationextraction 
C4
Textcategorization 
. Overviewofcategorizationtasksandmethods 
. Handcraftedrulebasedmethods 
. Inductivelearningfortextclassification 
.. NaïveBayesclassifiers 
.. Linearclassifiers* 
.. Decisiontreesanddecisionlists 
. NearestNeighboralgorithms 
. Combiningclassifiers 
.. Datafusion 
.. Boosting 
Tableofcontents 
.. Usingmultipleclassifiers 
. Evaluationoftextcategorizationsystems 
.. Evaluationstudies 
.. Evaluationmetrics 
.. Relevancejudgments 
.. Systemevaluation 
C5
Towardstextmining 
. Whatistextmining? 
. Referenceandcoreference 
.. Namedentityrecognition 
.. Thecoreferencetask 
. Automaticsummarization 
.. Summarizationtasks 
.. Constructingsummariesfromdocumentfragments 
.. Multi-documentsummarization(MDS) 
. Testingofautomaticsummarizationprograms 
.. Evaluationproblemsinsummarizationresearch 
.. Buildingacorpusfortrainingandtesting 
. ProspectsfortextminingandNLP 
Index 

Preface
Thereisnosingletextonthemarketthatcoverstheemergingtechnologiesof
documentretrieval,informationextraction,andtextcategorizationinacoher-
entfashion.Thisbookseekstosatisfyagenuineneedonthepartoftechnology
practitionersintheInternetspace,whoarefacedwithhavingtomakedifficult
decisionsas to what research has been done,and what the bestpractices are.
It is not intendedas a vendorguide (such things are quicklyout of date), or
asarecipeforbuildingapplications(suchrecipesareverycontext-dependent).
Butitdoesidentifythekeytechnologies,theissuesinvolved,andthestrengths
andweaknessesofthevariousapproaches.Thereisalsoastrongemphasison
evaluationin everychapter, both in termsof methodology(how to evaluate)
andwhatcontrolledexperimentationandindustrialexperiencehavetotellus.
Iwaspromptedtowrite thisbook afterspendingsevenyearsrunningan
R&DgroupinanInternetpublishingandsolutionsbusiness.Duringthattime,
wewereabletoputintoproductionanumberofsystemsthateithergenerated
revenueorenabledcostsavingsforthecompany,leveragingtechnologiesfrom
informationretrieval,informationextraction,andtextcategorization.Thisis
notachronicleoftheseexploits,butaprimerforthosewhoarealreadyinter-
estedinnaturallanguageprocessingforonlineapplications.Nevertheless,my
treatmentofthephilosophyandpracticeoflanguageprocessingiscoloredby
thecontextinwhichIfunction,namelythearenaofcommercialexploitation.
Thus, althoughthere isafocusontechnical detailandresearchresults,Ialso
addresssomeoftheissuesthatariseinapplyingsuchsystemstodatacollections
ofrealisticsizeandcomplexity.
Thebook isnotintendedexclusivelyasan academictext, althoughIsus-
pect that it will be of interestto studentswho wish to use these technologies
in an industrial setting. It is also aimed at software engineers, project man-
agers,andtechnologyexecutiveswhowantorneedtounderstandthetechnol-
ogyatsomelevel.Ihope thatsuch people findituseful,andthatit provokes
ideas,discussion,andactioninthefieldofappliedresearchanddevelopment.
Eachchapterbeginswithlightermaterialandthenprogressestoheavierstuff,
withsomeofthelatersectionsandsidebarsbeingmarkedwith anasteriskas