Peer Review #3 of "Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels (v0.2)"

Abstract: One of the major consequences of the growth of social networks has been the generation of huge volumes of content. The text that is generated in social networks constitutes a new type of content, that is short, informal, lacking grammar in some cases, and noise prone. Given the volume of information that is produced every day, a manual processing of this data is unpractical, causing the need of exploring and applying automatic processing strategies, like Entity Recognition (ER). It becomes necessary to evaluate the performance of traditional ER algorithms in corpus with those characteristics. This paper presents the results of applying AlchemyAPI y Dandelion API algorithms in a corpus provided by The SemEval-2015 Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis Conference. The entities recognized by each algorithm were compared against the ones annotated in the collection in order to calculate their precision and recall. Dandelion API got better results than AlchemyAPI with the given corpus. Spanish Abstract: Una de las principales consecuencias del auge actual de las redes sociales es la generación de grandes volúmenes de información. El texto generado en estas redes corresponde a un nuevo género de texto: corto, informal, gramaticalmente deficiente y propenso a ruido. Debido a la tasa de producción de la información, el procesamiento manual resulta poco práctico, surgiendo así la necesidad de aplicar estrategias de procesamiento automático, como Reconocimiento de Entidades (RE). Debido a las características del contenido, surge además la necesidad de evaluar el desempeño de los algoritmos tradicionales, en corpus extraídos de estas redes sociales. Este trabajo presenta los resultados obtenidos al aplicar los algoritmos de AlchemyAPI y Dandelion API en un corpus provisto por la conferencia The SemEval-2015 Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis. Las entidades reconocidas por cada algoritmo fueron comparadas con las anotadas en la colección, para calcular su precisión y exhaustividad. Dandelion API obtuvo mejores resultados que AlchemyAPI en el corpus dado.

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Evaluating named entity recognition tools for extracting social networks from novels

PeerJ Computer Science ◽

10.7717/peerj-cs.189 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 ◽

pp. e189 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Niels Dekker ◽

Tobias Kuhn ◽

Marieke van Erp

Keyword(s):

Social Networks ◽

Social Interactions ◽

Language Processing ◽

Named Entity Recognition ◽

Entity Recognition ◽

Computer Assisted ◽

Early 20Th Century ◽

Automatic Extraction ◽

Named Entities ◽

Named Entity

The analysis of literary works has experienced a surge in computer-assisted processing. To obtain insights into the community structures and social interactions portrayed in novels, the creation of social networks from novels has gained popularity. Many methods rely on identifying named entities and relations for the construction of these networks, but many of these tools are not specifically created for the literary domain. Furthermore, many of the studies on information extraction from literature typically focus on 19th and early 20th century source material. Because of this, it is unclear if these techniques are as suitable to modern-day literature as they are to those older novels. We present a study in which we evaluate natural language processing tools for the automatic extraction of social networks from novels as well as their network structure. We find that there are no significant differences between old and modern novels but that both are subject to a large amount of variance. Furthermore, we identify several issues that complicate named entity recognition in our set of novels and we present methods to remedy these. We see this work as a step in creating more culturally-aware AI systems.

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