Extracting Structured Summaries
from Text Documents

Dr. Zareen Syed
Research Assistant Professor, UMBC

10:30am, Monday, 9 November 2015, ITE 346, UMBC

In this talk, Dr. Syed will present unsupervised approaches for automatically extracting structured summaries composed of slots and fillers (attributes and values) and important facts from articles, thus effectively reducing the amount of time and effort spent on gathering intelligence by humans using traditional keyword based search approaches. The approach first extracts important concepts from text documents and links them to unique concepts in Wikitology knowledge base. It then exploits the types associated with the linked concepts to discover candidate slots and fillers. Finally it applies specialized approaches for ranking and filtering slots to select the most relevant slots to include in the structured summary.

Compared with the state of the art, Dr. Syed’s approach is unrestricted, i.e., it does not require manually crafted catalogue of slots or relations of interest that may vary over different domains. Unlike Natural Language Processing (NLP) based approaches that require well-formed sentences, the approach can be applied on semi-structured text. Furthermore, NLP based approaches for fact extraction extract lexical facts and sentences that require further processing for disambiguating and linking to unique entities and concepts in a knowledge base, whereas, in Dr. Syed’s approach, concept linking is done as a first step in the discovery process. Linking concepts to a knowledge base provides the additional advantage that the terms can be explicitly linked or mapped to semantic concepts in other ontologies and are thus available for reasoning in more sophisticated language understanding systems.