La thèse a deux objectifs : le premier est de développer un analyseur qui permet d'analyser automatiquement des sources textuelles en chinois simplifié afin de segmenter les textes en mots et de les étiqueter par catégories grammaticales, ainsi que de construire les relations syntaxiques entre les mots. Le deuxième est d'extraire des informations autour des entités et des actions qui nous intéressent à partir des textes analysés. Afin d'atteindre ces deux objectifs, nous avons traité principalement les problématiques suivantes : les ambiguïtés de segmentation, la catégorisation ; le traitement des mots inconnus dans les textes chinois ; l'ambiguïté de l'analyse syntaxique ; la reconnaissance et le typage des entités nommées. Le texte d'entrée est traité phrase par phrase. L'analyseur commence par un traitement typographique au sein des phrases afin d'identifier les écritures latines et les chiffres. Ensuite, nous segmentons la phrase en mots à l'aide de dictionnaires. Grâce aux règles linguistiques, nous créons des hypothèses de noms propres, changeons les poids des catégories ou des mots selon leur contextes gauches ou/et droits. Un modèle de langue n-gramme élaboré à partir d'un corpus d'apprentissage permet de sélectionner le meilleur résultat de segmentation et de catégorisation. Une analyse en dépendance est utilisée pour marquer les relations entre les mots. Nous effectuons une première identification d'entités nommées à la fin de l'analyse syntaxique. Ceci permet d'identifier les entités nommées en unité ou en groupe nominal et également de leur attribuer un type. Ces entités nommées sont ensuite utilisées dans l'extraction. Les règles d'extraction permettent de valider ou de changer les types des entités nommées. L'extraction des connaissances est composée des deux étapes : extraire et annoter automatiquement des contenus à partir des textes analysés ; vérifier les contenus extraits et résoudre la cohérence à travers une ontologie. / We have developed an automatic analyser and an extraction module for Chinese langage processing. The analyser performs automatic Chinese word segmentation based on linguistic rules and dictionaries, part-of-speech tagging based on n-gram statistics and dependency grammar parsing. The module allows to extract information around named entities and activities. In order to achieve these goals, we have tackled the following main issues: segmentation and part-of-speech ambiguity; unknown word identification in Chinese text; attachment ambiguity in parsing. Chinese texts are analysed sentence by sentence. Given a sentence, the analyzer begins with typographic processing to identify sequences of Latin characters and numbers. Then, dictionaries are used for preliminary segmentation into words. Linguistic-based rules are used to create proper noun hypotheses and change the weight of some word categories. These rules take into account word context. An n-gram language model is created from a training corpus and selects the best word segmentation and parts-of-speech. Dependency grammar parsing is used to annotate relations between words. A first step of named entity recognition is performed after parsing. Its goal is to identify single-word named entities and noun-phrase-based named entities and to determine their semantic type. These named entities are then used in knowledge extraction. Knowledge extraction rules are used to validate named entities or to change their types. Knowledge extraction consists of two steps: automatic content extraction and tagging from analysed text; extracted contents control and ontology-based co-reference resolution.

O Reconhecimento de Entidades Mencionadas (REM) é uma subtarefa da extração de informações e tem como objetivo localizar e classificar elementos do texto em categorias pré-definidas tais como nome de pessoas, organizações, lugares, datas e outras classes de interesse. Esse conhecimento obtido possibilita a execução de outras tarefas mais avançadas. O REM pode ser considerado um dos primeiros passos para a análise semântica de textos, além de ser uma subtarefa crucial para sistemas de gerenciamento de documentos, mineração de textos, extração da informação, entre outros. Neste trabalho, estudamos alguns métodos de Aprendizado de Máquina aplicados na tarefa de REM que estão relacionados ao atual estado da arte, dentre eles, dois métodos aplicados na tarefa de REM para a língua portuguesa. Apresentamos três diferentes formas de avaliação destes tipos de sistemas presentes na literatura da área. Além disso, desenvolvemos um sistema de REM para língua portuguesa utilizando Aprendizado de Máquina, mais especificamente, o arcabouço de máxima entropia. Os resultados obtidos com o nosso sistema alcançaram resultados equiparáveis aos melhores sistemas de REM para a língua portuguesa desenvolvidos utilizando outras abordagens de aprendizado de máquina. / Named Entity Recognition (NER), a task related to information extraction, aims to classify textual elements according to predefined categories such as names, places, dates etc. This enables the execution of more advanced tasks. NER is a first step towards semantic textual analysis and is also a crucial task for systems of information extraction and other types of systems. In this thesis, I analyze some Machine Learning methods applied to NER tasks, including two methods applied to Portuguese language. I present three ways of evaluating these types of systems found in the literature. I also develop an NER system for the Portuguese language utilizing Machine Learning that entails working with a maximum entropy framework. The results are comparable to the best NER systems for the Portuguese language developed with other Machine Learning alternatives.

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval.

Der Großteil des geschäftsrelevanten Wissens liegt heute als unstrukturierte Information in Form von Textdaten auf Internetseiten, in Office-Dokumenten oder Foreneinträgen vor. Zur Extraktion und Verwertung dieser unstrukturierten Informationen wurde eine Vielzahl von Text-Mining-Lösungen entwickelt. Viele dieser Systeme wurden in der jüngeren Vergangenheit als Webdienste zugänglich gemacht, um die Verwertung und Integration zu vereinfachen. Die Kombination verschiedener solcher Text-Mining-Dienste zur Lösung konkreter Extraktionsaufgaben erscheint vielversprechend, da so bestehende Stärken ausgenutzt, Schwächen der Systeme minimiert werden können und die Nutzung von Text-Mining-Lösungen vereinfacht werden kann. Die vorliegende Arbeit adressiert die flexible Kombination von Text-Mining-Diensten in einem serviceorientierten System und erweitert den Stand der Technik um gezielte Methoden zur Auswahl der Text-Mining-Dienste, zur Aggregation der Ergebnisse und zur Abbildung der eingesetzten Klassifikationsschemata. Zunächst wird die derzeit existierende Dienstlandschaft analysiert und aufbauend darauf eine Ontologie zur funktionalen Beschreibung der Dienste bereitgestellt, so dass die funktionsgesteuerte Auswahl und Kombination der Text-Mining-Dienste ermöglicht wird. Des Weiteren werden am Beispiel entitätsextrahierender Dienste Algorithmen zur qualitätssteigernden Kombination von Extraktionsergebnissen erarbeitet und umfangreich evaluiert. Die Arbeit wird durch zusätzliche Abbildungs- und Integrationsprozesse ergänzt, die eine Anwendbarkeit auch in heterogenen Dienstlandschaften, bei denen unterschiedliche Klassifikationsschemata zum Einsatz kommen, gewährleisten. Zudem werden Möglichkeiten der Übertragbarkeit auf andere Text-Mining-Methoden erörtert.

Information contained in the free text of health records is useful for the immediate care of patients as well as for medical knowledge creation. Advances in clinical language processing have made it possible to automatically extract this information, but most research has, until recently, been conducted on clinical text written in English. In this thesis, however, information extraction from Swedish clinical corpora is explored, particularly focusing on the extraction of clinical findings. Unlike most previous studies, Clinical Finding was divided into the two more granular sub-categories Finding (symptom/result of a medical examination) and Disorder (condition with an underlying pathological process). For detecting clinical findings mentioned in Swedish health record text, a machine learning model, trained on a corpus of manually annotated text, achieved results in line with the obtained inter-annotator agreement figures. The machine learning approach clearly outperformed an approach based on vocabulary mapping, showing that Swedish medical vocabularies are not extensive enough for the purpose of high-quality information extraction from clinical text. A rule and cue vocabulary-based approach was, however, successful for negation and uncertainty classification of detected clinical findings. Methods for facilitating expansion of medical vocabulary resources are particularly important for Swedish and other languages with less extensive vocabulary resources. The possibility of using distributional semantics, in the form of Random indexing, for semi-automatic vocabulary expansion of medical vocabularies was, therefore, evaluated. Distributional semantics does not require that terms or abbreviations are explicitly defined in the text, and it is, thereby, a method suitable for clinical corpora. Random indexing was shown useful for extending vocabularies with medical terms, as well as for extracting medical synonyms and abbreviation dictionaries.

La reconnaissance des entités nommées et une discipline cruciale du domaine du TAL. Elle sert à l'extraction de relations entre entités nommées, ce qui permet la construction d'une base de connaissance (Surdeanu and Ji, 2014), le résumé automatique (Nobata et al., 2002), etc... Nous nous intéressons ici aux phénomènes de structurations qui les entourent.Nous distinguons ici deux types d'éléments structurels dans une entité nommée. Les premiers sont des sous-chaînes récurrentes, que nous appelerons les affixes caractéristiques d'une entité nommée. Le second type d'éléments est les tokens ayant un fort pouvoir discriminant, appelés des tokens déclencheurs. Nous détaillerons l'algorithme que nous avons mis en place pour extraire les affixes caractéristiques, que nous comparerons à Morfessor (Creutz and Lagus, 2005b). Nous appliquerons ensuite notre méthode pour extraire les tokens déclencheurs, utilisés pour l'extraction d'entités nommées du Français et d'adresses postales.Une autre forme de structuration pour les entités nommées est de nature syntaxique, qui suit généralement une structure d'imbrications ou arborée. Nous proposons un type de cascade d'étiqueteurs linéaires qui n'avait jusqu'à présent jamais été utilisé pour la reconnaissance d'entités nommées, généralisant les approches précédentes qui ne sont capables de reconnaître des entités de profondeur finie ou ne pouvant modéliser certaines particularités des entités nommées structurées.Tout au long de cette thèse, nous comparons deux méthodes par apprentissage automatique, à savoir les CRF et les réseaux de neurones, dont nous présenterons les avantages et inconvénients de chacune des méthodes. / Named entity recognition is a crucial discipline of NLP. It is used to extract relations between named entities, which allows the construction of knowledge bases (Surdeanu and Ji, 2014), automatic summary (Nobata et al., 2002) and so on. Our interest in this thesis revolves around structuration phenomena that surround them.We distinguish here two kinds of structural elements in named entities. The first one are recurrent substrings, that we will call the caracteristic affixes of a named entity. The second type of element is tokens with a good discriminative power, which we call trigger tokens of named entities. We will explain here the algorithm we provided to extract such affixes, which we will compare to Morfessor (Creutz and Lagus, 2005b). We will then apply the same algorithm to extract trigger tokens, which we will use for French named entity recognition and postal address extraction.Another form of structuration for named entities is of a syntactic nature. It follows an overlapping or tree structure. We propose a novel kind of linear tagger cascade which have not been used before for structured named entity recognition, generalising other previous methods that are only able to recognise named entities of a fixed depth or being unable to model certain characteristics of the structure. Ours, however, can do both.Throughout this thesis, we compare two machine learning methods, CRFs and neural networks, for which we will compare respective advantages and drawbacks.

As the the amount of books available online the sizes of each these collections are at the same pace growing larger and more commonly in multiple languages. Many of these cor- pora contain duplicates in form of various editions or translations of books. The task of finding these duplicates is usually done manually but with the growing sizes making it time consuming and demanding. The thesis set out to find a method in the field of Text Mining and Natural Language Processing that can automatize the process of manually identifying these duplicates in a corpora mainly consisting of fiction in multiple languages provided by Storytel. The problem was approached using three different methods to compute distance measures between books. The first approach was comparing titles of the books using the Levenstein- distance. The second approach used extracting entities from each book using Named En- tity Recognition and represented them using tf-idf and cosine dissimilarity to compute distances. The third approach was using a Polylingual Topic Model to estimate the books distribution of topics and compare them using Jensen Shannon Distance. In order to es- timate the parameters of the Polylingual Topic Model 8000 books were translated from Swedish to English using Apache Joshua a statistical machine translation system. For each method every book written by an author was pairwise tested using a hypothesis test where the null hypothesis was that the two books compared is not an edition or translation of the others. Since there is no known distribution to assume as the null distribution for each book a null distribution was estimated using distance measures of books not written by the author. The methods were evaluated on two different sets of manually labeled data made by the author of the thesis. One randomly sampled using one-stage cluster sampling and one consisting of books from authors that the corpus provider prior to the thesis be considered more difficult to label using automated techniques. Of the three methods the Title Matching was the method that performed best in terms of accuracy and precision based of the sampled data. The entity matching approach was the method with the lowest accuracy and precision but with a almost constant recall at around 50 %. It was concluded that there seems to be a set of duplicates that are clearly distin- guished from the estimated null-distributions, with a higher significance level a better pre- cision and accuracy could have been made with a similar recall for the specific method. For topic matching the result was worse than the title matching and when studied the es- timated model was not able to create quality topics the cause of multiple factors. It was concluded that further research is needed for the topic matching approach. None of the three methods were deemed be complete solutions to automatize detection of book duplicates.

A cross-media analysis framework is an integrated multi-modal platform where a media resource containing different types of data such as text, images, audio and video is analyzed with metadata extractors, working jointly to contextualize the media resource. It generally provides cross-media analysis and automatic annotation, metadata publication and storage, searches and recommendation services. For on-line content providers, such services allow them to semantically enhance a media resource with the extracted metadata representing the hidden meanings and make it more efficiently searchable. Within the architecture of such frameworks, Natural Language Processing (NLP) infrastructures cover a substantial part. The NLP infrastructures include text analysis components such as a parser, named entity extraction and linking, sentiment analysis and automatic speech recognition. Since NLP tools and techniques are originally designed to operate in isolation, integrating them in cross-media frameworks and analyzing textual data extracted from multimedia sources is very challenging. Especially, the text extracted from audio-visual content lack linguistic features that potentially provide important clues for text analysis components. Thus, there is a need to develop various techniques to meet the requirements and design principles of the frameworks. In our thesis, we explore developing various methods and models satisfying text and speech analysis requirements posed by cross-media analysis frameworks. The developed methods allow the frameworks to extract linguistic knowledge of various types and predict various information such as sentiment and competence. We also attempt to enhance the multilingualism of the frameworks by designing an analysis pipeline that includes speech recognition, transliteration and named entity recognition for Amharic, that also enables the accessibility of Amharic contents on the web more efficiently. The method can potentially be extended to support other under-resourced languages.

The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also presents new opportunities for the interdiction of lone wolf terrorism. This dissertation is an account of the development and evaluation of an information technology (IT) framework for detecting potentially radicalized individuals on social media sites and Web fora. Unifying Collective Action Framing Theory (CAFT) and a radicalization model of lone wolf terrorism, this dissertation analyzes a corpus of propaganda documents produced by several, radically different, terror organizations. This analysis provides the building blocks to define a knowledge model of terrorist ideological framing that is implemented as a Semantic Web Ontology. Using several techniques for ontology guided information extraction, the resultant ontology can be accurately processed from textual data sources. This dissertation subsequently defines several techniques that leverage the populated ontological representation for automatically identifying individuals who are potentially radicalized to one or more terrorist ideologies based on their postings on social media and other Web fora. The dissertation also discusses how the ontology can be queried using intuitive structured query languages to infer triggering events in the news. The prototype system is evaluated in the context of classification and is shown to provide state of the art results. The main outputs of this research are (1) an ontological model of terrorist ideologies (2) an information extraction framework capable of identifying and extracting terrorist ideologies from text, (3) a classification methodology for classifying Web content as resonating the ideology of one or more terrorist groups and (4) a methodology for rapidly identifying news content of relevance to one or more terrorist groups.

O Reconhecimento de Entidades Mencionadas (REM) é uma subtarefa da extração de informações e tem como objetivo localizar e classificar elementos do texto em categorias pré-definidas tais como nome de pessoas, organizações, lugares, datas e outras classes de interesse. Esse conhecimento obtido possibilita a execução de outras tarefas mais avançadas. O REM pode ser considerado um dos primeiros passos para a análise semântica de textos, além de ser uma subtarefa crucial para sistemas de gerenciamento de documentos, mineração de textos, extração da informação, entre outros. Neste trabalho, estudamos alguns métodos de Aprendizado de Máquina aplicados na tarefa de REM que estão relacionados ao atual estado da arte, dentre eles, dois métodos aplicados na tarefa de REM para a língua portuguesa. Apresentamos três diferentes formas de avaliação destes tipos de sistemas presentes na literatura da área. Além disso, desenvolvemos um sistema de REM para língua portuguesa utilizando Aprendizado de Máquina, mais especificamente, o arcabouço de máxima entropia. Os resultados obtidos com o nosso sistema alcançaram resultados equiparáveis aos melhores sistemas de REM para a língua portuguesa desenvolvidos utilizando outras abordagens de aprendizado de máquina. / Named Entity Recognition (NER), a task related to information extraction, aims to classify textual elements according to predefined categories such as names, places, dates etc. This enables the execution of more advanced tasks. NER is a first step towards semantic textual analysis and is also a crucial task for systems of information extraction and other types of systems. In this thesis, I analyze some Machine Learning methods applied to NER tasks, including two methods applied to Portuguese language. I present three ways of evaluating these types of systems found in the literature. I also develop an NER system for the Portuguese language utilizing Machine Learning that entails working with a maximum entropy framework. The results are comparable to the best NER systems for the Portuguese language developed with other Machine Learning alternatives.