Extracting Relations from Large Plain-Text Collections

Text documents often contain valuable structured data that is hidden in regular English sentences. This data is best exploited if available as a relational table that we could use for answering precise queriesor for running data mining tasks. We explore a technique for extracting such tables from document collections that requires only a handful of training examples from users. These examples are used to generate extraction patterns,that in turn result in new tuples being extracted from the document collection. We build on this idea and present our Snowball system. Snowball introduces novel strategies for generating patterns and extracting tuples from plain-text documents. At each iteration of the extraction process, Snowball evaluates the quality of these patterns and tuples without human intervention,In this paper we also develop a scalable evaluation methodology and metrics for our task, and present a thorough experimental evaluation of Snowball and comparable techniques over a collection of more than 300,000 newspaper documents

Extracting Synonymous Gene and Protein Terms From Biological Literature

Genes and proteins are often associated with multiple names. More names are added as new functional or structural information is discovered. Because authors can use any one of the known names for a gene or protein, information retrieval and extraction would benefit from identifying the gene and protein terms that are synonyms of the same substance

Combining Strategies for Extracting Relations from Text Collections

Text documents often contain valuable structured data that is hidden in regular English sentences. This data is best exploited if available as a relational table that we could use for answering precise queries or for running data mining tasks. Our Snowball system extracts these relations from document collections starting with only a handful of user-provided example tuples. Based on these tuples, Snowball generates patterns that are used, in turn, to find more tuples. In this paper we introduce a new pattern and tuple generation scheme for Snowball, with different strengths and weaknesses than those of our original system. We also show preliminary results on how we can combine the two versions of Snowball to extract tuples more accurately