Extracting information from informal communication

This thesis focuses on the problem of extracting information from informal communication. Textual informal communication, such as e-mail, bulletin boards and blogs, has become a vast information resource. However, such information is poorly organized and difficult for a computer to understand due to lack of editing and structure. Thus, techniques which work well for formal text, such as newspaper articles, may be considered insufficient on informal text. One focus of ours is to attempt to advance the state-of-the-art for sub-problems of the information extraction task. We make contributions to the problems of named entity extraction, co-reference resolution and context tracking. We channel our efforts toward methods which are particularly applicable to informal communication. We also consider a type of information which is somewhat unique to informal communication: preferences and opinions. Individuals often expression their opinions on products and services in such communication. Others' may read these "reviews" to try to predict their own experiences. However, humans do a poor job of aggregating and generalizing large sets of data. We develop techniques that can perform the job of predicting unobserved opinions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Rennie, Jason D. M. (Jason Daniel Malyutin), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Tommi Jaakkola.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/38683
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/38683

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38683