Analyzing the Complexity of a Domain With Respect To An Information Extraction Task

In this paper we describe a method of classifying facts (information) into categories or levels; where each level signifies a different degree of difficulty of extracting the fact from a piece of text containing it. Based on this classification mechanism, we also propose a method of evaluating a domain by assigning to it a 'domain number' based on the levels of a set of standard facts present in the articles of that domain. In addition, we undertake two studies. The first study evaluates the effect of levels on the performance of message understanding systems while the second evaluates the effect of discourse processing, specifically coreferencing, on the performance of message understanding systems.