Information Extraction in Biomedical Literature

Abstract

Information extraction (IE) technology has been defined and developed through the US DARPA Message Understanding Conferences (MUCs). IE refers to the identification of instances of particular events and relationships from unstructured natural language text documents into a structured representation or relational table in databases. It has proved successful at extracting information from various domains, such as the Latin American terrorism, to identify patterns related to terrorist activities (MUC-4). Another domain, in the light of exploiting the wealth of natural language documents, is to extract the knowledge or information from these unstructured plain-text files into a structured or relational form. This form is suitable for sophisticated query processing, for integration with relational databases, and for data mining. Thus, IE is a crucial step for fully making text files more easily accessible.