Named Entities for Computational Linguistics [Hardcover]

One of the challenges brought on by the digital revolution of the recent decades is the mechanism by which information carried by texts can be extracted in order to access its contents.

The processing of named entities remains a very active area of research, which plays a central role in natural language processing technologies and their applications. Named entity recognition, a tool used in information extraction tasks, focuses on recognizing small pieces of information in order to extract information on a larger scale.

The authors use written text and examples in French and English to present the necessary elements for the readers to familiarize themselves with the main concepts related to named entities and to discover the problems associated with them, as well as the methods available in practice for solving these issues.

Introduction  ix

Chapter 1. Named Entities for Accessing Information  1

1.1. Research program history 2

1.1.1. Understanding documents: an ambitious task 2

1.1.2. Detecting basic elements: named entities  3

1.1.3. Trend: a return to slot filling 7

1.2. Task using named entities as a basic representation 9

1.3. Conclusion 10

Chapter 2. Named Entities, Referential Units 11

2.1. Issues with the named entity concept 12

2.1.1. A heterogeneous set 12

2.1.2. Existing defining formulas 17

2.1.3. An NLP object 21

2.2. The notions of meaning and reference 22

2.2.1. What is the reference? 22

2.2.2. What is meaning? 24

2.3. Proper names 27

2.3.1. The traditional criteria for defining a proper name 28