High Precision Information Extraction

ABSTRACT Most fully automatic information extraction systems achieve less than 100% extraction precision and recall. On real applications these parameters typically vary between 50% to 95%, depending on the extraction method and source data. We present an information extraction system designed for applications where little or no error can be tolerated. The system is not fully automatic. Instead, the extraction is guided by the intervention of a human expert. This \expert in the loop" approach greatly ampli es the amount of extraction an individual can accomplish, while insuring that the extraction process is nearly 100% accurate. We used a tool we created called HPIEW (for High Precision Information Extraction Workbench) to extract several different elds from the text remark elds of the Protein Data Bank (PDB). The workbench allowed us to extract each eld from more than 5,000 PDB les in an afternoon, with extraction precision and recall estimated to be greater than 99.9%. We believe this approach may be useful for other extraction problems where extreme accuracy is required.