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RelHunter: a machine learning method for relation extraction from text

Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society volume 16, pages 191–199 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

We propose RelHunter, a machine learning-based method for the extraction of structured information from text. RelHunter’s key idea is to model the target structures as a relation over entities. Hence, the modeling effort is reduced to the identification of entities and the generation of a candidate relation, which are simpler problems than the original one. RelHunter fits a very broad spectrum of complex computational linguistic problems. We apply it to five tasks: phrase chunking, clause identification, hedge detection, quotation extraction, and dependency parsing. We compare RelHunter to token classification approaches through several computational experiments on seven multilingual corpora. RelHunter outperforms the token classification approaches by 2.14% on average. Moreover, we compare the derived systems against state-of-the-art systems for each corpus. Our systems achieve state-of-the-art performances for three corpora: Portuguese phrase chunking, Portuguese clause identification, and English quotation extraction. Additionally, the derived systems show good quality performance for the other four corpora.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Informática, PUC-Rio, R. Mq. de São Vicente 225, Rio de Janeiro, 22.451-900, Brasil

    Eraldo R. Fernandes & Ruy L. Milidiú

  2. Microsoft Enterprise Search Group, Redmond, USA

    Raúl P. Rentería

Authors
  1. Eraldo R. Fernandes
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  2. Ruy L. Milidiú
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  3. Raúl P. Rentería
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eraldo R. Fernandes.

Additional information

This work was partially funded by CNPq and FAPERJ grants 557.128/2009-9 and E-26/170028/2008. The first author holds a CNPq doctoral fellowship and is supported by Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Goiás, Brazil.

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Fernandes, E.R., Milidiú, R.L. & Rentería, R.P. RelHunter: a machine learning method for relation extraction from text. J Braz Comput Soc 16, 191–199 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13173-010-0018-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13173-010-0018-y

Keywords

  • Natural language processing
  • Entity relation extraction
  • Machine learning
  • Entropy Guided Transformation Learning