The Prolog Interface to the Unstructured Information Management Architecture

TL;DR

This paper presents a Prolog interface for UIMA that enables rule-based natural language processing by translating unstructured data into a Prolog knowledge base for advanced analysis and annotation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Prolog interface to UIMA that integrates logic programming with unstructured data analysis for NLP tasks.

Findings

Effective rule-based analysis of unstructured data

Integration with external knowledge bases like WordNet

Applications in question analysis and shallow parsing

Abstract

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the Prolog interface to the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) and some of its applications in natural language processing. The UIMA Prolog interface translates unstructured data and the UIMA Common Analysis Structure (CAS) into a Prolog knowledge base, over which, the developers write rules and use resolution theorem proving to search and generate new annotations over the unstructured data. These rules can explore all the previous UIMA annotations (such as, the syntactic structure, parsing statistics) and external Prolog knowledge bases (such as, Prolog WordNet and Extended WordNet) to implement a variety of tasks for the natural language analysis. We also describe applications of this logic programming interface in question analysis (such as, focus detection, answer-type and other constraints detection), shallow parsing (such as, relations in the syntactic structure), and answer selection.