Review of information extraction technologies and applications

Information extraction (IE) is an important and growing field, in part because of the development of ubiquitous social media networking millions of people and producing huge collections of textual information. Mined information is being used in a wide array of application areas from targeted marketing of products to intelligence gathering for military and security needs. IE has its roots in artificial intelligence fields including machine learning, logic and search algorithms, computational linguistics, and pattern recognition. This review summarizes the history of IE, surveys the various uses of IE, identifies current technological accomplishments and challenges, and explores the role that neural and adaptive computing might play in future research. A goal for this review is also to encourage practitioners of neural and adaptive computing to look for interesting applications in the important emerging area of IE.