Adding Semantics to the Information Extraction Process

While information extraction helps for finding entities, classifying and storing them in a database, semantically enhanced information extraction couples those entities with their semantic descriptions and connections from a knowledge graph. The latter is also known as semantic annotation. Technically, semantic annotation adds metadata to the extracted concepts, providing both class and instance information about them.

Semantic annotation is applicable for any sort of text – web pages, regular (non-web) documents, text fields in databases, etc. Further knowledge acquisition can be performed on the basis of extracting more complex dependencies – analysis of relationships between entities, event and situation descriptions, etc.

Extending the existing practices of information extraction, semantic information extraction enables new types of applications such as:

 highlighting, indexing and retrieval;

 categorization and generation of more advanced metadata;

 Smooth traversal between unstructured text and available relevant knowledge.