Enhanced Services for Targeted Information Retrieval by Event Extraction and Data Mining

Where Information Retrieval (IR) and Text Categorization delivers a set of (ranked) documents according to a query, users of large document collections would rather like to receive answers. Question-answering from text has already been the goal of the Message Understanding Conferences. Since then, the task of text understanding has been reduced to several more tractable tasks, most prominently Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction. Now, pieces can be put together to form enhanced services added on an IR system. This paper presents a framework which combines standard IR with machine learning and (pre-)processing for NER in order to extract events from a large document collection.