Automatic Extraction of Definitions in Portuguese: A Rule-Based Approach

In this paper we present a rule-based system for automatic extraction of definitions from Portuguese texts. As input, this system takes text that is previously annotated with morpho-syntactic information, namely on POS and inflection features. It handles three types of definitions, whose connector between definiendum and definiens is the so-called copula verb “to be”, a verb other that one, or punctuation marks. The primary goal of this system is to act as a tool for supporting glossary construction in e-learning management systems. It was tested using a collection of texts that can be taken as learning objects, in three different domains: information society, computer science for non experts, and e-learning. For each one of these domains and for each type of definition typology, evaluation results are presented. On average, we obtain 14% for precision, 86% for recall and 0.33 for F2 score.