MSc Thesis

In August 2007 I became a Master of Science in the field of Artificial Intelligence by writing my master thesis.

My thesis describes an unsupervised technique to expand semantic lexicons using Information Extraction. The technique consists of a bootstrapping algorithm that iteratively finds a small expansion to the semantic lexicon. In each iteration the algorithm:

• Finds all occurrences of the semantic lexicon in the unannotated corpus
• Finds a set of extraction patterns able to extract these occurrences from the corpus
• Finds the set of extractions made by the set of extraction patterns
• Ranks the set of extractions (by scoring the extractions and the extraction patterns) and adds the highest scored extractions to the semantic lexicon.

I applied this technique on a corpus of about 40.000 movie reviews taken from rec.arts.movies.reviews and semantic lexicons consisting of movie titles, actors and certifications (e.g. R, PG-13).