Tuesday 23 October 2007

Retrieval of relevant information in the area of chemistry remains a challenge. Recent progress in the area of information extraction technologies promises to solve a broad spectrum of problems associated with the time consuming tasks of “finding all relevant information”, “finding all relevant mentions and relationships” and “making all this information available to an entire community / organisation”. However, despite the attractive perspectives of fully automated information extraction, there is considerable discrepancy between the promises of vendors of information extraction technology and the true problem solving of real existing problems in the day-to-day work of researchers and patent specialists.

This presentation reviews some of the recent benchmarking activities in the area of information extraction, with a special focus on named entity recognition and relationship mining. It sheds some light on recent research in the area of information extraction from chemical structure depictions, as communication of chemical information through images is one of the preferred routes taken in chemistry and pharmaceutical sciences. The presentation combines an overview on technological approaches with a critical review of performance measures and the outcome of critical assessments and benchmarking activities in the scientific community.