An example of an information extraction task Information extraction systems analyse unrestricted text in order to extract information about pre-specified types of events, entities or relationships To help illustrate the process of information extraction, and to highlight some of the difficulties involved, a example is given for you to tackle yourself.
Background Consider the information needs of an analyst who tracks changes in company management.
This might normally be undertaken by a news clipping service, where information retrieval techniques might be used to fetch relevant articles which would then be laboriously, and expensively, scanned by workers. IE systems can now perform this task automatically. A sample of text from the Wall Street Journal is given below, together with a template. The task is to fill the template with information about succession events extracted from the text. The first is completed as an example.