Text Mining-Supported Information Extraction: An Extended Methodology for Developing Information Extraction Systems

Information extraction (IE) and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) are both useful approaches for discovering information in textual corpora, but they have some deficiencies. Information extraction can identify relevant sub-sequences of text, but is usually unaware of emerging, previously unknown knowledge and regularities in a text and thus cannot form new facts or new hypotheses. Complementary to information extraction, emerging data mining methods and techniques promise to overcome the deficiencies of information extraction. This research work combines the benefits of both approaches by integrating data mining and information extraction methods. The aim is to provide a new high-quality information extraction methodology and, at the same time, to improve the performance of the underlying extraction system. Consequently, the new methodology should shorten the life cycle of information extraction engineering because information predicted in early extraction phases can be used in further extraction steps, and the extraction rules developed require fewer arduous test-and-debug iterations. Effectiveness and applicability are validated by processing online documents from the areas of eHealth and eRecruitment.