Valentin TABLAN
Research Associate
University of Sheffield
Marea Britanie
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The Coming of Age of Information Extraction
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ABSTRACT
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The move in later years from paper based documents toward electronic
text along with the growth of the Internet and the accumulation
of vast amounts of textual data in many commercial intra-nets
has triggered the demand for a means of automatic access to
the knowledge stored in electronic text. The task of harvesting
structured, quantifiable and unambiguous data from natural language
text is known as Information Extraction (IE).

The last two decades of the Twentieth Century, saw IE become
a highly productive research area in the NLP field, a process
driven most prominently by the MUC series of conferences (1987
- 1998) where a large number of research laboratories, both
academic and commercial, were involved. Now, the advent of the
Semantic Web, the continuing penetration of the Internet as
well as the convergence of human language technologies and knowledge
representation formalisms has spurred a renewed interest in
IE.

This talk will include some background on IE research moving
on to address the new opportunities and challenges brought forth
by the development of the Semantic Web. In conclusion some recent
applications of IE technology will be presented.
          
SHORT CV
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Valentin Tablan has worked as a Research Associate in  the NLP
research group at the University of Sheffield since 1999 when
he finished his studies at the Faculty of Computer Science in
Iasi. 
He has been a main contributor to the design and development
of the widely used GATE system
(http://gate.ac.uk) and is now leading the technical work 
for Sheffield's involvement in the EU-funded project PrestoSpace
and the UK-funded project ETCSL.
His research interests lie in the areas of Information Extraction,
the use of ontologies in human language technologies and the
use of NLP techniques for knowledge management, especially in
the field of multimedia.