Extracting Concrete Entities through Spatial Relations

This paper focuses on the automated extraction of concrete entities from a specialized-domain corpus. Then, in a bootstrapping phase, the candidates are used to extract new candidates. Concrete entities are automatically identified by a set of spatial features. In a spatial scene something is located by virtue of the spatial properties associated with a reference object. The axial properties are represented by place adverbs. Additionally, for identifying referent objects in a sentence we consider syntactical patterns extracted by chunking. In order to reduce noise in results, we take into account a corpus comparison approach and linguist heuristics. Results show high precision in candidates with high weights.