Information Extraction - A User Guide

This technical memo describes Information Extraction from the point-of-view of a potential user of the technology. No knowledge of language processing is assumed. Information Extraction is a process which takes unseen texts as input and produces fixed-format, unambiguous data as output. This data may be used directly for display to users, or may be stored in a database or spreadsheet for later analysis, or may be used for indexing purposes in Information Retrieval applications. See also http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish

Software Infrastructure for Natural Language Processing

We classify and review current approaches to software infrastructure for research, development and delivery of NLP systems. The task is motivated by a discussion of current trends in the field of NLP and Language Engineering. We describe a system called GATE (a General Architecture for Text Engineering) that provides a software infrastructure on top of which heterogeneous NLP processing modules may be evaluated and refined individually, or may be combined into larger application systems. GATE aims to support both researchers and developers working on component technologies (e.g. parsing, tagging, morphological analysis) and those working on developing end-user applications (e.g. information extraction, text summarisation, document generation, machine translation, and second language learning). GATE promotes reuse of component technology, permits specialisation and collaboration in large-scale projects, and allows for the comparison and evaluation of alternative technologies. The first release of GATE is now available - see http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/research/groups/nlp/gate/

New Methods, Current Trends and Software Infrastructure for NLP

The increasing use of `new methods' in NLP, which the NeMLaP conference series exemplifies, occurs in the context of a wider shift in the nature and concerns of the discipline. This paper begins with a short review of this context and significant trends in the field. The review motivates and leads to a set of requirements for support software of general utility for NLP research and development workers. A freely-available system designed to meet these requirements is described (called GATE - a General Architecture for Text Engineering). Information Extraction (IE), in the sense defined by the Message Understanding Conferences (ARPA \cite{Arp95}), is an NLP application in which many of the new methods have found a home (Hobbs \cite{Hob93}; Jacobs ed. \cite{Jac92}). An IE system based on GATE is also available for research purposes, and this is described. Lastly we review related work.

A General Architecture for Language Engineering (GATE) - a new approach to Language Engineering R&D

This report argues for the provision of a common software infrastructure for NLP systems. Current trends in Language Engineering research are reviewed as motivation for this infrastructure, and relevant recent work discussed. A freely-available system called GATE is described which builds on this work.