The common pattern specification language

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper describes the Common Pattern Specification Language (CPSL) that was developed during the TIPSTER program by a committee of researchers from the TIPSTER research sites. Many information extraction systems work by matching regular expressions over the lexical features of input symbols. CPSL was designed as a language for specifying such finite-state grammars for the purpose of specifying information extraction rules in a relatively system-independent way. The adoption of such a common language would enable the creation of shareable resources for the development of rule-based information extraction systems.