A Treebank-based Investigation of IPP-triggering Verbs in Dutch

Profiling Feature Selection for Named Entity
Classification in the TüBa-D/Z Treebank
Kathrin Beck, Erhard Hinrichs
Department of General and Computational Linguistics
University of Tübingen
Email: {kbeck;eh}@sfs.uni-tuebingen.de
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of the named entity annotation included in the
TüBa-D/Z treebank of German newspaper articles. It describes the subclasses of
named entities distinguished by the TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme and profiles a set
of surface-oriented and syntax-based features that are highly predictive for different
subclasses of named entities.
1 Introduction
The annotation and automatic detection of named entities (henceforth
abbreviated as NE) in large corpora has played a major role in recent research
in computational linguistics and in the field of digital humanities. In digital
humanities research, NEs have featured prominently in the creation of linked
data for classical text collections and the visualization of the content of
corpus collections by linking NEs with their geospatial coordinates. In
computational linguistics, the identification of NEs is an important ingredient
in the automatic detection of coreference relations in texts, of automatic topic
detection and text classification, as well as for question-answering and other
information retrieval and extraction applications.
In order to provide training material for (semi-)supervised learning
algorithms for automatic NE detection, the annotation of corpus materials
with NEs has been an important desideratum. For this reason, the linguistic
annotation of the Tübingen Treebank of Written German (TüBa-D/Z) 1 has
been enhanced in recent years by NE information. To the best of our
knowledge, the TüBa-D/Z NE annotation constitutes the largest dataset of
this kind for German apart from the German data prepared for the CoNLL-
2003 NE recognition shared task (Tjong Kim Sang and de Meulder [9]) and
the GerNED corpus (Ploch et al. [6]) (cf. Table 1).
1 The TüBa-D/Z Treebank (PID: http://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-1778-0000-0005-896C-F)
is freely available on http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/en/ascl/resources/corpora/tuebadz/.
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