Why Read if You Can Scan? Trigger Scoping Strategy for Biographical Fact Extraction

The rapid growth of information sources brings a unique challenge to biographical information extraction: how to find specific facts without having to read all the words. An effective solution is to follow the human scanning strategy which keeps a specific keyword in mind and searches within a specific scope. In this paper, we mimic a scanning process to extract biographical facts. We use event and relation triggers as keywords, identify their scopes and apply type constraints to extract answers within the scope of a trigger. Experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods up to 26% absolute gain in F-score without using any syntactic analysis or external knowledge bases.