Finite-state transducer cascades to extract named entities in texts

AbstractA lot of Named Entity Extraction Systems were created in English thanks to the impulse of MUC conferences. This article describes a Finite-State Transducer Cascade for the extraction of named entities in French journalistic texts. Finite-State Cascades are widely used for Natural Language Processing: a cascade is a series of finite-state transducers applied to a text transforming it. Such transducer cascades allow implementation of syntactic analysis, translation memory and information extraction. We present our general system named CasSys: this system uses the INTEX natural language processing features to realize a transducer cascade. CasSys is not dedicated to the extraction of named entity; we use it for this task but thanks to Intex, it allows syntactic analyses, information extraction or other tasks