A Framework for Extraction of Relations from Text using Relational Learning and Similarity Measures

Named entity recognition (NER) has been studied largely in the Information Extraction community as it is one step in the construction of an Information Extraction System. However, to extract only names without contextual information is not sufficient if we want to be able to describe facts encountered in documents, in particular, academic documents. Then, there is a need for extracting relations between entities. This task is accomplished using relational learning algorithms embedded in an Information Extraction framework. In particular, we have extended two relational learning frameworks RAPIER and FOIL. Our proposed extended frameworks are equipped with DSSim (short for Dempster-Shafer Similarity) our similarity service. Both extended frameworks were tested using an electronic newsletter consisting of news articles describing activities or events happening in an academic institution as our main application is on education.