WEIR-P: An Information Extraction Pipeline for the Wastewater Domain

We present the MeDO project, aimed at developing resources for text mining and information extraction in the wastewater domain. We developed a specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline named WEIR-P (WastewatEr InfoRmation extraction Platform) which identifies the entities and relations to be extracted from texts, pertaining to information, wastewater treatment, accidents and works, organizations, spatio-temporal information, measures and water quality. We present and evaluate the first version of the NLP system which was developed to automate the extraction of the aforementioned annotation from texts and its integration with existing domain knowledge. The preliminary results obtained on the Montpellier corpus are encouraging and show how a mix of supervised and rule-based techniques can be used to extract useful information and reconstruct the various phases of the extension of a given wastewater network. While the NLP and Information Extraction (IE) methods used are state of the art, the novelty of our work lies in their adaptation to the domain, and in particular in the wastewater management conceptual model, which defines the relations between entities. French resources are less developed in the NLP community than English ones. The datasets obtained in this project are another original aspect of this work.