Extraction of Informative Expressions from Domain-specific Documents

What kinds of lexical resources are helpful for extracting useful information from domain-specific documents? Although domain-specific documents contain much useful knowledge, it is not obvious how to extract such knowledge efficiently from the documents. We need to develop techniques for extracting hidden information from such domain-specific documents. These techniques do not necessarily use state-of-the-art technologies and achieve deep and accurate language understanding, but are based on huge amounts of linguistic resources, such as domain-specific lexical databases. In this paper, we introduce two techniques for extracting informative expressions from documents: the extraction of related words that are not only taxonomically related but also thematically related, and the acquisition of salient terms and phrases. With these techniques we then attempt to automatically and statistically extract domain-specific informative expressions in aviation documents as an example and evaluate the results.