Extraction of information from unstructured text

Extracting information from unstructured text has become an emphasis in recent years due to the large amount of text now electronically available. This status report describes the findings and work done by the end of the first year of a two-year LDRD. Requirements of the approach included that it model the information in a domain independent way. This means that it would differ from current systems by not relying on previously built domain knowledge and that it would do more than keyword identification. Three areas that are discussed and expected to contribute to a solution include (1) identifying key entities through document level profiling and preprocessing, (2) identifying relationships between entities through sentence level syntax, and (3) combining the first two with semantic knowledge about the terms