Prerequisites for Extracting Entity Relations from Swedish Texts

Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) is a vibrant area of research with many practical applications today like sentiment analyses, text labeling, questioning an- swering, machine translation and automatic text summarizing. At the moment, research is mainly focused on the English language, although many other lan- guages are trying to catch up. This work focuses on an area within NLP called information extraction, and more specifically on relation extraction, that is, to ex- tract relations between entities in a text. What this work aims at is to use machine learning techniques to build a Swedish language processing pipeline with part-of- speech tagging, dependency parsing, named entity recognition and coreference resolution to use as a base for later relation extraction from archival texts. The obvious difficulty lies in the scarcity of Swedish annotated datasets. For exam- ple, no large enough Swedish dataset for coreference resolution exists today. An important part of this work, therefore, is to create a Swedish coreference solver using distantly supervised machine learning, which means creating a Swedish dataset by applying an English coreference solver on an unannotated bilingual corpus, and then using a word-aligner to translate this machine-annotated En- glish dataset to a Swedish dataset, and then training a Swedish model on this dataset. Using Allen NLP:s end-to-end coreference resolution model, both for creating the Swedish dataset and training the Swedish model, this work achieves an F1-score of 0.5. For named entity recognition this work uses the Swedish BERT models released by the Royal Library of Sweden in February 2020 and achieves an overall F1-score of 0.95. To put all of these NLP-models within a single Lan- guage Processing Pipeline, Spacy is used as a unifying framework.