Automatic content extraction (ACE) is a research program for developing advanced
information extraction
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...
technologies
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in medicine, science, ...
convened by the
NIST from 1999 to 2008, succeeding
MUC and precedin
Text Analysis Conference
Goals and efforts
In general objective, the ACE program is motivated by and addresses the same issues as the MUC program that preceded it. The ACE program, however, defines the research objectives in terms of the target objects (i.e., the entities, the relations, and the events) rather than in terms of the words in the text. For example, the so-called "named entity" task, as defined in MUC, is to identify those words (on the page) that are names of entities. In ACE, on the other hand, the corresponding task is to identify the entity so named. This is a different task, one that is more abstract and that involves inference more explicitly in producing an answer. In a real sense, the task is to detect things that "aren't there".
While the ACE program is directed toward extraction of information from
audio
Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to:
Sound
* Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound
*Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum
* Digital audio, representation of sou ...
and
image sources in addition to pure text, the research effort is restricted to information extraction from text. The actual
transduction of audio and image data into text is not part of the ACE research effort, although the processing of
ASR and
OCR output from such transducers is.
The effort involves:
* defining the research tasks in detail,
* collecting and annotating data needed for training, development, and evaluation,
* supporting the research with evaluation tools and
research workshops.
Topics and exercises
Given a text in
natural language, the ACE challenge is to detect:
# entities mentioned in the text, such as: persons, organizations, locations, facilities, weapons, vehicles, and geo-political entities.
# relations between entities, such as: person A is the manager of company B. Relation types include: role, part, located, near, and social.
# events mentioned in the text, such as: interaction, movement, transfer, creation and destruction.
The program relates to
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
,
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
texts.
The ACE corpus is one of the standard benchmarks for testing new information extraction
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
s.
References
* George Doddington@NIS T, Alexis Mitchell@LD C, Mark Przybocki@NIS T, Lance Ramshaw@BB N, Stephanie Strassel@LD C, Ralph Weischedel@BB N
The automatic content extraction (ACE) program–tasks, data, and evaluation.2004
External links
MUC- ACE's predecessor.
ACE{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130925194420/http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ace/ , date=2013-09-25 (LDC)
ACE(NIST)
Information retrieval organizations