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GATE: A Unicode-based

Infrastructure SupportingMultilingual Information Extraction

Kalina Bontcheva, Diana Maynard,Valentin Tablan, Hamish Cunningham

Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield

http://gate.ac.uk/

Structure of the talk: A brief introduction to GATE

Multilingual infrastructure in GATE

Simple multilingual IE components

http://gate.ac.uk/http://gate.ac.uk/

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GATE is... An architecture A macro-level organisational picture for LE

software systems. A framework For programmers, GATE is an object-oriented

class library that implements the architecture. A development environment For language engineers,

computational linguists et al, a graphical developmentenvironment.

GATE comes with... Some free components... ...and wrappers for other people's

components Tools for: evaluation; visualise/edit; persistence; IR; IE;

dialogue; ontologies; etc. Free software (LGPL). Download at

http://gate.ac.uk/download/

http://gate.ac.uk/download/http://gate.ac.uk/download/

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Architectural principles

Non-prescriptive, theory neutral (strength and weakness) Re-use, interoperation, not reimplementation (e.g. diverse

XML support, integration of Protg, Jena, Weka...) (Almost) everything is a component, and component sets

are user-extendable (Almost) all operations are available both from API and GUI

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Component-based development

CREOLE Collection of REusable Objects for Language Engineering: Java Beans: an OO way of chunking software GATE components: modified Java Beans with XML

configuration The minimal component = 10 lines of Java, 10 lines of

XML, 1 URL Three types: Language Resources, Processing

Resources, Visual Resources

Why bother? Allows the system to load arbitrary language processing

components

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Language Resources (LRs) LRs are documents, ontologies, corpora, lexicons,

LRs can be associated with DataStores (Oracle,PostgreSQL, XML, Java Serialisation) Documents / corpora:

Diverse document formats: text, html, XML, email,RTF, SGML

Optional format-preserving markup analyse / save Standoff annotation model (start, end, type, features),

derivative of TIPSTER, compatible with ATLAS andXCES

Coping with diverse character encodings: New internationalised versions of JVM support >100

different encodings. Other encodings: developing system for user-entry of

mapping tables (remove programming from the process)

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Processing Resources (PRs) Algorithmic components knows as PRs beans

with execute methods. All PRs can handle Unicode data by default. Clear distinction between code and data (simple

repurposing).

20-30 freebies with GATE Controllers: execute a set of PRs

SerialController: sequential run of arbitrary PR set SerialAnalyserController: analyser PRs over corpus

Conditional controllers: execute depend on features Parallel controller? PRs + Controller = Applications Application parameterisation state can be saved

and restored, and used for embedding / batching

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VRs (2): Coreference

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VRs (3): Syntax

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Displaying Multilingual Data

GATE uses standard (& imperfect) Java rendering engine for displaying text.

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GATE Unicode Kit (GUK) Complements Javas facilities

Support for definingInput Methods (IMs)

Currently 30 IMs

for 17 languages Pluggable in otherapplications (e.g.JEdit, EUDICO)

Can use virtual kybdor standard layoutsover QWERTY

IMs defined in plain text files GUK comes with a

standalone Unicode editor

Editing Multilingual Data

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Processing Multilingual Data All processing, visualisation and editing tools use GUK

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Multilingual IE ComponentsThe ANNIE system a reusable and easily extendable set of

components

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The Unicode Tokeniser A very portable component for multliple languages:

splits text into typed tokens based on FSM dynamically constructed from rules based on

character categories defined by the Unicode, e.g.:UPPERCASE_LETTER(LOWERCASE_LETTER|DASH_PUNCTUATION)*

> Token;orth=upperInitial;kind=word; output generally localised by a later module (e.g.

dont do nt) 23 rules seem able to handle without changes Indo-European languages.

the English tokeniser: Unicode tokeniser + pattern

grammar FST

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POS tagging in new languages

TIDES Surprise Language: Hepple tagger butsubstituted Cebuano/Hindi lexicon for English

Used empty ruleset since no training data

available Used default heuristics (e.g. return NNP forcapitalised words)

Very experimental, but reasonable results

67% correctness for Hindi and 75% forCebuano

Adaptation time per language - 2 days

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Porting NE grammars

Most English JAPE rules based on POS tagsand gazetteer lookup

Grammars can be reused for languages withsimilar word order, orthography etc.

No time to make detailed study of Cebuano,but very similar in structure to English

Most of the rules left as for English, but someadjustments to handle especially dates

Used both English and Cebuano grammarsand gazetteers, because NEs appear in bothlanguages

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TIDES Evaluation Results

Cebuano EnglishBaseline

Entity P R F P R F

Person 71 65 68 36 36 36

Org 75 71 73 31 47 38

Location 73 78 76 65 7 12Date 83 100 92 42 58 49

Total 76 79 77.5 45 41.7 43

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Conclusion

GATE a Unicode-based NLP infrastructure,particularly suitable for multilingual adaptation ofIE systems

Requires little involvement of native speakers

and very little annotated data for a basic job Future work

Improving multilingual support, e.g.,

morphology support, automatic language andencoding identification Learning gazetteer lists from annotated

corpora