A pilot investigation of information extraction in the semantic annotation of archaeological reports

The paper discusses a prototype investigation of semantic annotation, a form of metadata assigning conceptual entities to textual instances; in the case of archaeological grey literature. The use of Information Extraction (IE), a Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique, is central to the annotation process while the use of Knowledge Organization System (KOS) is explored for the association of semantic annotation with both ontological and terminological references. The annotation process follows a rule-based information extraction approach using the GATE NLP toolkit, together with the CIDOC CRM ontology, its CRM-EH archaeological extension and English Heritage thesauri and glossaries. Results are reported from an initial evaluation, which suggest that these information extraction techniques can be applied to archaeological grey literature reports. Further work is discussed drawing on the evaluation and consideration of the characteristics of the archaeology domain.