RELAX - Extractino of Semantic Relations in Biographical Contexts

The automatic extraction of biographical information from business news is a complex task. This approach deals with the characterization of the so called biographical relations by means of local grammars. In order to provide a well-founded proceeding, it is necessary to give a complete and accurate definition of the notion “relation” seen here as a social relationship between human beings or expressing the binding of person to a biographical event, such as birth, marriage, divorce, professional career etc. This paper outlines the linguistic background and modeling method of our system RELAX doing semantic RELAtion eXtraction and linking persons to their corresponding biographical information. Results show that software applications like question-answering systems can successfully deal with this method and efficiently retrieve semantic knowledge out of text corpora. MOTS-CLÉS : extraction d’informations biographiques, relations sémantiques, grammaires locales, entités nommées, questions-réponses.