Ontology-based information extraction in agents’ hands

This paper briefly reports on an agent team doing ontology-based information extraction (OBIE, IE) for summarization in clinical Bone Marrow Transplantation (BMT). The SummIt-BMT agents contribute to OBIE through their flexible use of ontological knowledge. They assess input text passages from web retrieval with respect to a user query. They use an ontology that supports IE in particular with concepts, propositions, unifiers and paraphrases. Sentences with IE hits are annotated with the IDs of ontology propositions that recognize an instance of their content in the sentence. The agents are beginners, but they perform. Distributing ontology-based IE to agents has some promise: it enables parallel processing, it eases tracking of decisions and their explanation to users.