Luis Iraola

The UNL initiative: an overview

We present here a description of the UNL initiative based on the Universal Networking Language (UNL). This language was conceived to support multilingual communication on the Internet across linguistic barriers. This initiative was launched by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United Nations University in 1996. The initial consortium was formed to support 15 languages. Eight years later, this initial consortium changed, many components and resources were developed, and the UNL language itself evolved to support different types of applications, from multilingual generation to “knowledge repositories” or cross- lingual information retrieval applications. We describe the main features of this UNL Language, making a comparison with some similar approaches, such as interlinguas. We also describe some organizational and managerial aspects of the UNL according to criteria of quality and maturity, placing emphasis on the fact that the initiative is open to any interested group or researcher.

Interlinguas: a classical approach for the semantic web. a practical case

An efficient use of the web will imply the ability to find not only documents but also specific pieces of information according to users query. Right now, this last possibility is not tackled by current information extraction or question answering systems, since it requires both a deeper semantic understanding of queries and contents along with deductive capabilities. In this paper, the authors propose the use of Interlinguas as a plausible approach to search and extract specific pieces of information from a document, given the semantic nature of Interlinguas and their support for deduction. More concretely, the authors describe the UNL Interlinguas from the representational point of view and illustrate its deductive capabilities by means of an example.

Author Extraction: A Test Experience for Flexible Information Extraction

This paper presents an experience in the area of information extraction within the framework of the on-going research ESPRIT IV project FLEX. The work presented is part of a larger effort aimed at building the first prototype of a flexible information system and it has consisted in the detection and extraction of named entities from a collection of newspaper articles. Although name extraction has received the attention of the Information Extraction research community from the beginning, this attention has been recently increased by the inclusion of a Named Entity task both in the Seventh Message Understanding Conference [1] and the Information Retrieval and Extraction Exercise [2]. The work presented is a practical application of techniques discussed and developed in recent years by the Information Extraction community. Besides that practical application, the results obtained serve for validating our overall approach to cost-effective, re-usable information extraction in the context of a viable, marketable system.