A Comparative Study of the Application of Different Learning Techniques to Natural Language Interfaces

In this paper we present first results from a comparative study. Its aim is to test the feasibility of different inductive learning techniques to perform the automatic acquisition of linguistic knowledge within a natural language database interface. In our interface architecture the machine learning module replaces an elaborate semantic analysis component. The learning module learns the correct mapping of a user's input to the corresponding database command based on a collection of past input data. We use an existing interface to a production planning and control system as evaluation and compare the results achieved by different instance-based and model-based learning algorithms.Comment: 10 pages, to appear CoNLL9

Machine Learning in Automated Text Categorization

The automated categorization (or classification) of texts into predefined categories has witnessed a booming interest in the last ten years, due to the increased availability of documents in digital form and the ensuing need to organize them. In the research community the dominant approach to this problem is based on machine learning techniques: a general inductive process automatically builds a classifier by learning, from a set of preclassified documents, the characteristics of the categories. The advantages of this approach over the knowledge engineering approach (consisting in the manual definition of a classifier by domain experts) are a very good effectiveness, considerable savings in terms of expert manpower, and straightforward portability to different domains. This survey discusses the main approaches to text categorization that fall within the machine learning paradigm. We will discuss in detail issues pertaining to three different problems, namely document representation, classifier construction, and classifier evaluation.Comment: Accepted for publication on ACM Computing Survey

The Development and the Evaluation of a System for Extracting Events from Web Pages

The centralization of a particular event is primarily useful for running news services. These services should provide updated information, if possible even in real time, on a specific type of event. These events and their extraction involved the automatic analysis of linguistic structure documents to determine the possible sequences in which these events occur in documents. This analysis will provide structured and semi-structured documents in which the unit events can be extracted automatically. In order to measure the quality of a system, a methodology will be introduced, which describes the stages and how the decomposition of a system for extracting events in components, quality attributes and properties will be defined for these components, and finally will be introduced metrics for evaluation.Event, Performance Metric, Event Extraction System