Learning to Identify Definition using Syntactic Features

This paper describes an approach to learning concept definitions which operates on fully parsed text. A subcorpus of the Dutch version of Wikipedia was searched for sentences which have the syntactic properties of definitions. Next, we experimented with various text classification techniques to distinguish actual definitions from other sentences. A maximum entropy classifier which incorporates features referring to the position of the sentence in the document as well as various syntactic features, gives the best results.