Adapting a resource-light highly multilingual Named Entity Recognition system to Arabic

Wajdi Zaghouani, Bruno Pouliquen, Mohamed Ebrahim, Ralf Steinberger

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We present a working Arabic information extraction (IE) system that is used to analyze large volumes of news texts every day to extract the named entity (NE) types person, organization, location, date and number, as well as quotations (direct reported speech) by and about people. The Named Entity Recognition (NER) system was not developed for Arabic, but - instead - a highly multilingual, almost language-independent NER system was adapted to also cover Arabic. The Semitic language Arabic substantially differs from the Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages currently covered. This paper thus describes what Arabic language-specific resources had to be developed and what changes needed to be made to the otherwise language-independent rule set in order to be applicable to the Arabic language. The achieved evaluation results are generally satisfactory, but could be improved for certain entity types.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
EditorsDaniel Tapias, Irene Russo, Olivier Hamon, Stelios Piperidis, Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Bente Maegaard, Jan Odijk, Mike Rosner
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages563-567
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)2951740867, 9782951740860
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010 - Valletta, Malta
Duration: 17 May 201023 May 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
Country/TerritoryMalta
CityValletta
Period17/05/1023/05/10

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