Unstructured Information Management (Project, SS 2011)

Description

While a significant amount of knowledge today is already available in structured form in databases or as part of the semantic web, most knowledge still is recorded in unstructured form as natural language artifacts such as text documents, audio or video recordings. The Unstructured Information Management (UIMA) framework, originally developed by IBM, offers a platform to impose structure on unstructured data, and thus facilitates the extraction of knowledge from unstructured sources.

This project addresses changing topics from the areas of natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, and semantic knowledge processing.

• Extract text from unstructured sources
• Index the extracted text and search on it
• Come up with some searches and manually make a list of relevant results to use as a basis for evaluation
• Use various techniques from simple dictionaries to semantic resources to improve results
• Visualize results
• Evaluate performance 

The Darmstadt Knowledge Processing Software Repository (DKPro) provided by UKP offers a set of ready-to-use Java libraries for analysis and indexing. The project will be implemented on top of the Apache Unstructured Information Management (UIMA) framework.

Literature

• D. Ferrucci and A. Lally. Accelerating corporate research in the development, application and deployment of human language technologies. SEALTS '03: Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 workshop on Software engineering and architecture of language technology systems, p67-74. Association for Computational Linguistics. Morristown, NJ, USA (2003) ( PDF available via ACM Portal)
•  Apache UIMA Homepage
• Darmstadt Knowledge Processing Software Repository

Prerequisites and Preparation

• Knowledge of Java programming
• Principles of algorithms and data structures

Deliverables

• Homework for the introductory sessions
• Kick-off presentation
• Weekly progress report
• Documented source code
• Unit tests
• Project manual
• Final presentation

Timetable

Introductory sessions will be held during the first three weeks Thursdays (14.04., 21.04., 28.04.) from 15:30 to 18:30 in S2|02 D017. Each session consists of a lecture part taking followed by an exercise part.

Brief regular status meetings are (tentatively) planned for Thursdays between 15:30 to 18:30. Actual times may vary depending on the number of participants.

Lecturers

• Benjamin Herbert
• Richard Eckart de Castilho