Extraction of Expressions concerning Accident Cause contained in Articles on Traffic Accidents

Abstract

We propose a method for extracting expressions concerning accident cause (e.g., “mishandling of the steering wheel control”) contained in articles of traffic accidents from a newspaper corpus.It is effective to develop traffic accident prevention devices by analyzing cause of the traffic accident cases obtained by our method.Our method extracts expressions concerning accident cause from articles of traffic accidents extracted as a preprocessing from a newspaper corpus by using SVMs.Here, we define an expression modified by expressions concerning accident cause as “a seed expression”.Our method acquires expressions concerning accident cause from an initial seed expression provided manually.Moreover, our method acquires seed expressions from the expressions concerning accident cause and acquires new expressions concerning accident cause from the acquired seed expressions.By iterating these processes, expressions concerning accident cause and seed expressions are acquired. Experimental results showed that our method attained 77.2% precison and 38.6% recall.Here, we define a sentence containing both an expression concerning accident cause and a seed expression or a sentence containing an expression that adds “rashii (seemto)” to an expression concerning accident cause as acause sentence and the precision and the recall of extraction of cause sentences attained 87.2% and 40.8%, respectively.