Named Entity Recognition (NER) poses new challenges in real-world documents in which there are entities with different roles according to their purpose or meaning. Retrieving all the possible entities in scenarios in which only a subset of them based on their role is needed, produces noise on the overall precision. This work proposes a NER model that relies on role classification models that support recognizing entities with a specific role. The proposed model has been implemented in two use cases using Spanish drug Summary of Product Characteristics: identification of therapeutic indications and identification of adverse reactions. The results show how precision is increased using a NER model that is oriented towards a specific role and discards entities out of scope.

Language resources, such as multilingual lexica and multilingual electronic dictionaries, contain collections of lexical entries in several languages. Having access to the corresponding explicit or implicit translation relations between such entries might be of great interest for many NLP-based applications. By using Semantic Web-based techniques, translations can be available on the Web to be consumed by other (semantic enabled) resources in a direct manner, not relying on application-specific formats. To that end, in this paper we propose a model for representing translations as linked data, as an extension of the lemon model. Our translation module represents some core information associated to term translations and does not commit to specific views or translation theories. As a proof of concept, we have extracted the translations of the terms contained in Terminesp, a multilingual terminological database, and represented them as linked data. We have made them accessible on the Web both for humans (via a Web interface) and software agents (with a SPARQL endpoint).

In this paper, we present an ontology-based methodology and architecture for the comparison, assessment, combination (and, to some extent, also contrastive evaluation) of the results of different linguistic tools. More specifically, we describe an experiment aiming at the improvement of the correctness of lemma tagging for Spanish. This improvement was achieved by means of the standardisation and combination of the results of three different linguistic annotation tools (Bitext’s DataLexica, Connexor’s FDG Parser and LACELL’s POS tagger), using (1) ontologies, (2) a set of lemma tagging correction rules, determined empirically during the experiment, and (3) W3C standard languages, such as XML, RDF(S) and OWL. As we show in the results of the experiment, the interoperation of these tools by means of ontologies and the correction rules applied in the experiment improved significantly the quality of the resulting lemma tagging (when compared to the separate lemma tagging performed by each of the tools that we made interoperate).

Automatic tagging in Spanish has historically faced many problems because of some specific grammatical constructions. One of these traditional pitfalls is the “se” particle. This particle is a multifunctional and polysemous word used in many different contexts. Many taggers do not distinguish the possible uses of “se” and thus provide poor results at this point. In tune with the philosophy of free software, we have taken a free annotation tool as a basis, we have improved and enhanced its behaviour by adding new rules at different levels and by modifying certain parts in the code to allow for its possible implementation in other EAGLES-compliant tools. In this paper, we present the analysis carried out with different annotators for selecting the tool, the results obtained in all cases as well as the improvements added and the advantages of the modified tagger.