> I wonder if anybody could provide me with some advice related to tools
> or references related to the:
>
> 1) automatic construction of dictionary-like definitions of terms
> extracted automatically from free text articles, or alternatively
> 2) the retrieval of sentences which are likely to describe definitions
> of terms within documents would also be appreciated.
I think this has much in common with the problem of answering definition
questions in question answering. I would think that
Hildebrandt/Katz/Lin (2003): Answering Definition Questions
Using Multiple Knowledge Sources
(http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/hlt-naacl2004/main/pdf/137_Paper.pdf)
could be a good starting point.
If you want to get something as in your example:
> [HpaB] : HpaB is a protein which promotes the secretion of a large set
> of effector proteins and prevents the delivery of non-effectors into the
> plant cell.
a good start could be to use a list of upper-level terms like "protein",
"amino acid" etc. as well as action verbs and then scan the text for patterns
like
HpaB, [NP], [NP] and other [Hypernym-NP]s
as well as
HpaB [VP [action verb] ...]
For reference, see e.g.
Hearst, M.(1992): Automatic Acquisition of Hyponyms from Large Text Corpora
(see http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst/publications.html)
or
R. Girju, A. Badulescu, and D. Moldovan (2000):
Learning Semantic Constraints for the Automatic Discovery of Part-Whole
Relations
R. Girju(2003):
Automatic Detection of Causal Relations for Question Answering
(see Automatic Detection of Causal Relations for Question Answering)
Kind regards,
Yannick Versley
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