Title
Semantic tagging of unknown proper nouns
Abstract
In this paper, we describe a context-based method to semantically tag unknown proper nouns (U-PNs) in corpora. Like many others, our system relies on a gazetteer and a set of context-dependent heuristics to classify proper nouns. However, proper nouns are an open-end class: when parsing new fragments of a corpus, even in the same language domain, we can expect that several proper nouns cannot be semantically tagged. The algorithm that we propose assigns to an unknown PN an entity type based on the analysis of syntactically and semantically similar contexts already seen in the application corpus. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated not only in terms of precision, following the tradition of MUC conferences, but also in terms of information gain, an information theoretic measure that takes into account the complexity of the classification task.
Year
DOI
Venue
1999
10.1017/S135132499900220X
Natural Language Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
classification task,information theoretic measure,application corpus,semantic tagging,tag unknown proper noun,muc conference,unknown pn,context-based method,semantically similar context,proper noun,information gain,noun
Computer science,Information gain,Heuristics,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Parsing,Proper noun
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
5
2
8
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.40
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alessandro Cucchiarelli122636.38
Danilo Luzi2175.47
paola velardi31553163.66