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  • © 2016

Natural Language Understanding in a Semantic Web Context

  • Shows how NLP techniques can be exploited for semantic processing, information extraction and knowledge acquisition
  • Presents standard algorithms and fundamental concepts for various text analysis tasks
  • Emphasizes the importance of experimental design and result analysis, by including small experiments on corpus data with quantitative and qualitative analysis
  • Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvii
  2. Introduction

    • Caroline Barrière
    Pages 1-6
  3. Searching for Entities in Text

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 7-8
    2. Entities, Labels, and Surface Forms

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 9-22
    3. Searching for Named Entities

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 23-38
    4. Comparing Surface Forms

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 39-55
  4. Working with Corpora

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 57-57
    2. Exploring Corpora

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 59-84
    3. Words in Sequence

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 85-103
    4. Bilingual Corpora

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 105-125
  5. Semantic Grounding and Relatedness

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 127-128
    2. Linguistic Roles

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 129-150
    3. Definition-Based Grounding

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 151-171
    4. Relatedness

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 173-201
  6. Knowledge Acquisition

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 203-204
    2. Pattern-Based Relation Extraction

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 205-229
    3. From Syntax to Semantics

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 231-254
    4. Semantic Types

      • Caroline Barrière
      Pages 255-274
  7. Back Matter

    Pages 275-317

About this book

This book serves as a starting point for Semantic Web (SW) students and researchers interested in discovering what Natural Language Processing (NLP) has to offer. NLP can effectively help uncover the large portions of data held as unstructured text in natural language, thus augmenting the real content of the Semantic Web in a significant and lasting way. The book covers the basics of NLP, with a focus on Natural Language Understanding (NLU), referring to semantic processing, information extraction and knowledge acquisition, which are seen as the key links between the SW and NLP communities. Major emphasis is placed on mining sentences in search of entities and relations. In the course of this “quest", challenges will be encountered for various text analysis tasks, including part-of-speech tagging, parsing, semantic disambiguation, named entity recognition and relation extraction. Standard algorithms associated with these tasks are presented to provide an understanding of the fundamental concepts. Furthermore, the importance of experimental design and result analysis is emphasized, and accordingly, most chapters include small experiments on corpus data with quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results.

This book is divided into four parts. Part I “Searching for Entities in Text” is dedicated to the search for entities in textual data. Next, Part II “Working with Corpora” investigates corpora as valuable resources for NLP work. In turn, Part III “Semantic Grounding and Relatedness” focuses on the process of linking surface forms found in text to entities in resources. Finally, Part IV “Knowledge Acquisition” delves into the world of relations and relation extraction. The book also includes three appendices: “A Look into the Semantic Web” gives a brief overview of the Semantic Web and is intended to bring readers less familiar with the Semantic Web up to speed, so that they too can fully benefit from the material of this book. “NLP Tools and Platforms” provides information about NLP platforms and tools, while “Relation Lists” gathers lists of relations under different categories, showing how relations can be varied and serve different purposes. And finally, the book includes a glossary of over 200 terms commonly used in NLP.

The book offers a valuable resource for graduate students specializing in SW technologies and professionals looking for new tools to improve the applicability of SW techniques in everyday life – or, in short, everyone looking to learn about NLP in order to expand his or her horizons. It provides a wealth of information for readers new to both fields, helping them understand the underlying principles and the challenges they may encounter.

Reviews

“The expected audience of this book is graduate students or researchers wishing to get an overview of NLP focusing on information extraction. It is written with care, easily readable and well suited for learning. … a young researcher can use the experimentation methodology excellently presented throughout the book outside of NLP as well. … For those who want to discover recent trends in NLP, I would recommend extending this reading with material on machine and deep learning approaches.” (Computing Reviews, August, 2017)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Montréal, Canada

    Caroline Barrière

About the author

Caroline Barrière is a senior researcher at the Computer Research Institute of Montréal (CRIM).  Earlier, she worked as a research officer in the Interactive Language Technologies Group at the National Research Council Canada, and as an associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Information Technology and Engineering. Her main research interest is on knowledge representation and automatic knowledge extraction from text.  She is particularly interested in the interrelation between natural language processing and the semantic web, with special focus on relation extraction, word sense disambiguation and specialized language analysis.

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 59.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 79.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access