Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice

Chapter 9. Relations and Events

Daniel M. Bikel and Vittorio Castelli

9.1. Introduction

The world is awash in words. These words are increasingly being stored electronically: as of 2008, the world surpassed more than 1 trillion unique web pages, all of which contain at least some text, and this number has been growing at more than 1 billion pages per day [1]. As we learned in previous chapters, natural language text is rife with ambiguity and loaded with information. In fact, these two properties are quite complementary. With so many electronic text documents, humans have an ever-increasing need for computer systems that can automatically synthesize the free-form, ambiguous text documents into more precise, more compact, structured representations. ...