TY - JOUR AB - In this paper we give a synoptic view of the growth of the text processing technology of information extraction (IE) whose function is to extract information about a preā€specified set of entities, relations or events from natural language texts and to record this information in structured representations called templates. Here we describe the nature of the IE task, review the history of the area from its origins in AI work in the 1960s and 70s till the present, discuss the techniques being used to carry out the task, describe application areas where IE systems are or are about to be at work, and conclude with a discussion of the challenges facing the area. What emerges is a picture of an exciting new text processing technology with a host of new applications, both on its own and in conjunction with other technologies, such as information retrieval, machine translation and data mining. VL - 54 IS - 1 SN - 0022-0418 DO - 10.1108/EUM0000000007162 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000007162 AU - Gaizauskas Robert AU - Wilks Yorick PY - 1998 Y1 - 1998/01/01 TI - Information extraction: beyond document retrieval T2 - Journal of Documentation PB - MCB UP Ltd SP - 70 EP - 105 Y2 - 2024/03/29 ER -