Extraction de patrons sémantiques appliquée à la classification d'Entités Nommées

International audienceLa variabilité des corpus constitue un problème majeur pour les systèmes de reconnaissance d'entités nommées. L'une des pistes possibles pour y remédier est l'utilisation d'approches linguistiques pour les adapter à de nouveaux contextes : la construction de patrons sémantiques peut permettre de désambiguïser les entités nommées en structurant leur environnement syntaxico-sémantique. Cet article présente une première réalisation sur un corpus de presse d'un système de correction. Après une étape de segmentation sur des critères discursifs de surface, le système extrait et pondère les patrons liés à une classe d'entité nommée fournie par un analyseur. Malgré des modèles encore relativement élémentaires, les résultats obtenus sont encourageants et montrent la nécessité d'un traitement plus approfondi de la classe Organisation. Abstract Corpus variation is a major problem for named entity recognition systems. One possible direction to tackle this problem involves using linguistic approaches to adapt them to unseen contexts : building semantic patterns may help for their disambiguation by structuring their syntactic and semantic environment. This article presents a preliminary implementation on a press corpus of a correction system. After a segmentation step based on surface discourse clues, the system extracts and weights the patterns linked to a named entity class provided by an analyzer. Despite relatively elementary models, the results obtained are promising and point on the necessary treatment of the Organisation class. Mots-clés : entités nommées, patrons sémantiques, segmentation discursive de surface Keywords: named entities, semantic patterns, surface discourse segmentation ISMAÏL EL MAAROUF, JEANNE VILLANEAU, SOPHIE ROSSE

What’s missing in geographical parsing?

Geographical data can be obtained by converting place names from free-format text into geographical coordinates. The ability to geo-locate events in textual reports represents a valuable source of information in many real-world applications such as emergency responses, real-time social media geographical event analysis, understanding location instructions in auto-response systems and more. However, geoparsing is still widely regarded as a challenge because of domain language diversity, place name ambiguity, metonymic language and limited leveraging of context as we show in our analysis. Results to date, whilst promising, are on laboratory data and unlike in wider NLP are often not cross-compared. In this study, we evaluate and analyse the performance of a number of leading geoparsers on a number of corpora and highlight the challenges in detail. We also publish an automatically geotagged Wikipedia corpus to alleviate the dearth of (open source) corpora in this domain.We gratefully acknowledge the funding support of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Ph.D. Studentship NE/M009009/1 (MG) and EPSRC (NC and NL: Grant No. EP/M005089/1

Where are you talking about? Advances and Challenges of Geographic Analysis of Text with Application to Disease Monitoring

The Natural Language Processing task we focus on in this thesis is Geoparsing. Geoparsing is the process of extraction and grounding of toponyms (place names). Consider this sentence: "The victims of the Spanish earthquake off the coast of Malaga were of American and Mexican origin." Four toponyms will be extracted (called Geotagging) and grounded to their geographic coordinates (called Toponym Resolution). However, our research goes further than any previous work by showing how to distinguish the literal place(s) of the event (Spain, Malaga) from other linguistic types/uses such as nationalities (Mexican, American), improving downstream task accuracy. We consolidate and extend the Standard Evaluation Framework, discuss key research problems, then present concrete solutions in order to advance each stage of geoparsing. For geotagging, as well as training a SOTA neural Location-NER tagger, we simplify Metonymy Resolution with a novel minimalist feature extraction combined with an LSTM-based classifier, matching SOTA results. For toponym resolution, we deploy the latest deep learning methods to achieve SOTA performance by augmenting neural models with hitherto unused geographic features called Map Vectors. With each research project, we provide high-quality datasets and system prototypes, further building resources in this field. We then show how these geoparsing advances coupled with our proposed Intra-Document Analysis can be used to associate news articles with locations in order to monitor the spread of public health threats. To this end, we evaluate our research contributions with production data from a real-time downstream application to improve geolocation of news events for disease monitoring. The data was made available to us by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), which operates one such system called MediSys that processes incoming news articles in order to monitor threats to public health and make these available to a variety of governmental, business and non-profit organisations. We also discuss steps towards an end-to-end, automated news monitoring system and make actionable recommendations for future work. In summary, the thesis aims are twofold: (1) Generate original geoparsing research aimed at advancing each stage of the pipeline by addressing pertinent challenges with concrete solutions and actionable proposals. (2) Demonstrate how this research can be applied to news event monitoring to increase the efficacy of existing biosurveillance systems, e.g. European Commission’s MediSys.I was generously funded by DREAM CDT, which was funded by NERC of UKRI