Automatic extraction of facts from press releases to generate news stories

Abstract

While complete understanding of arbitrary input text remains in the future, it is currently possible to construct natural language processing systems that provide a partial understanding of text with limited accuracy. Moreover, such systems can provide cost-effective solutions to commercially-significant business problems. This paper describes one such system: JASPER. JASPER is a fact extraction system recently developed and deployed by Carnegie Group for Reuters Ltd. JASPER uses a template-driven approach, partial understanding techniques, and heuristic procedures to extract certain key pieces of information from a limited range of text.We believe that many significant business problems can be solved by fact extraction applications which involve locating and extracting specific, predefined types of information from a limited range of text. The information extracted by such systems can be used in a variety of ways, such as filling in values in a database, generating summaries of the input text, serving as a part of the knowledge in an expert system, or feeding into another program which bases decisions on it. We expect to develop many such applications in the future using similar techniques.