Event information extraction using link grammar

Abstract

In this paper, we present a scheme for identifying instances of events and extracting information about them. The scheme can handle all events with which an action can be associated, which covers most types of events. Our system basically tries to extract semantic information from the syntactic structure given by the link grammar system described by D. Sleator and D. Temperly (1991) to any English sentence. The instances of events are identified by finding all sentences in the text where the verb, which best represents the action in the event, or one of its synonyms/hyponyms occurs as a main verb. Then, information about that instance of the event is derived using a set of rules which we have developed to identify the subject and object as well as the modifiers of all verbs and nouns in any English sentence, making use of the structure given by the link parser. The scheme was tested on the Reuters corpus and gave recall and precision even up to 100%.