Ollie is a program that automatically identifies and extracts binary relationships from English sentences. Ollie is designed for Web-scale information extraction, where target relations are not specified in advance.

Ollie is our second-generation information extraction system . Whereas ReVerb operates on flat sequences of tokens, Ollie works with the tree-like (graph with only small cycles) representation using Stanford's compression of the dependencies. This allows Ollie to capture expression that ReVerb misses, such as long-range relations.

Ollie also captures context that modifies a binary relation. Presently Ollie handles attribution (He said/she believes) and enabling conditions (if X then).

sentence: If I slept past noon, I'd be late for work.
extraction: (I; 'd be late for; work)[enabler=If I slept past noon]

sentence: Some people say Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
extraction: (Barack Obama; was not born in; the United States)[attrib=Some people say]

sentence: Early astronomers believe that the earth is the center of the universe.
extraction: (the earth; is the center of; the universe)[attrib=Early astronomers believe]

sentence: After winning the Superbowl, the Saints are now the top dogs of the NFL.
extraction: (the Saints; are now the top dogs of; the NFL)

sentence: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke at a conference on Monday.
extraction: (Bill Gates; be co-founder of; Microsoft)

sentence: I learned that the 2012 Sasquatch music festival is scheduled for May 25th until May 28th.
extraction: (the 2012 Sasquatch music festival; is scheduled until; May 28th)
extraction: (the 2012 Sasquatch music festival; is scheduled for; May 25th)

If you want to run Ollie on a small amount of text without modifying the source code, you can use an executable file that can be run from the command line. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Download the latest Ollie binary from http://knowitall.cs.washington.edu/ollie/ollie-app-latest.jar.

2. Run java -Xmx512m -jar ollie-app-latest.jar yourfile.txt. Omit the input file for an interactive console.

Building Ollie from source requires Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org). Run this command to download the required dependencies, compile, and create a single jar file.

mvn clean package

The compiled class files will be put in the base directory. The single executable jar file will be written to ollie-app-VERSION.jar where VERSION is the version number.

Once you have built Ollie, you can run it from the command line.

java -Xmx512m -jar ollie-app-VERSION.jar yourfile.txt

Omit the input file for an interactive console.

Ollie takes sentences, one-per-line as input or splits text into sentences if --split is specified. Run Ollie with --usage to see full usage. There are many useful options; for example you can run Ollie in parallel using --parallel.

Ollie works ontop of a subcomponent called OpenParse. The distinction is largely technical; OpenParse does not handle attribution and enabling condition and uses a coarser confidence metric. You can use a GUI application to visualize the OpenParse extractions in a parse tree. To use it, you will need to have graphviz installed. You can run the GUI with:

java -Xms512M -Xmx1g -cp ollie-app-VERSION.jar edu.washington.cs.knowitall.openparse.OpenParseGui

By default, this application will look for graphviz's dot program at /usr/bin/dot. You can specify a location with the --graphviz parameter.

You can try out your own models with Options->Load Model.... Your model may have one or more patterns in it. If you want to see pattern matches instead of triple extractions, you can choose to show the raw match with Options->Raw Matches. This will allow you to use patterns that don't capture an arg1, rel, and arg2. To see an example model, look at openparse.model in src/main/resources.

To modify the Ollie source code in Eclipse, use the M2Eclipse plugin along with ScalaIDE. You can then import the project using the following.

File > Import > Existing Maven Projects

Add the following as a Maven dependency.

<groupId>edu.washington.cs.knowitall.ollie</groupId>
<artifactId>ollie-core_2.9.2</artifactId>
<version>[1.0.0, )</version>

The best way to find the latest version is to browse Maven Central.

ollie-core does not include a way to parse sentences. You will need to use a parser supplied by the nlptools project. The source for for ollie-app is an excellent example of a project using ollie-core as a dependency. ollie-app supplies a parser from nlptools.

To contact the UW about Ollie, email knowit-ollie@cs.washington.edu.

• Michael Schmitz (http://www.schmitztech.com)
• Robert Bart (rbart at cs.washington.edu)

If you use Ollie in your academic work, please cite Ollie with the following BibTeX citation:

@inproceedings{ollie-emnlp12,
  author = {Mausam and Michael Schmitz and Robert Bart and Stephen Soderland and Oren Etzioni},
  title = {Open Language Learning for Information Extraction},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CONLL)},
  year = {2012}
}