Ontology-driven discourse analysis for information extraction

This paper presents a novel approach to discourse analysis within information extraction systems. It makes use of DRT as formal representation of the linguistic context as well as of a domain-specific ontology as a basis to compute conceptual relations between extracted events thus establishing discourse coherence. The approach has been implemented within GenIE, an information extraction system with the aim of extracting information about biochemical pathways, about sequences, structures and functions of genomes and proteins. The approach is evaluated against a semantically hand-annotated set of Swiss-Prot protein function descriptions and shows very promising results.