A Cascaded Approach to Mention Detection and Chaining in Arabic

This paper presents a fully statistical approach to Arabic mention detection and chaining system, built around the maximum entropy principle. The presented system takes a cascade approach to processing an input document, by first detecting mentions in the document and then chaining the identified mentions into entities. Both system components use a common maximum entropy framework, which allows the integration of a large array of feature types, including lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic features. Arabic offers additional challenges for this task (when compared with English, for example), as segmentation is a needed processing step, so one can correctly identify and resolve enclitic pronouns. The system presented has obtained very competitive performance in the automatic content extraction (ACE) evaluation program.