LearningPinocchio: adaptive information extraction for real world applications

The new frontier of research on Information Extraction from texts is portability without any knowledge of Natural Language Processing. The market potential is very large in principle, provided that a suitable easy-to-use and effective methodology is provided. In this paper we describe LearningPinocchio, a system for adaptive Information Extraction from texts that is having good commercial and scientific success. Real world applications have been built and evaluation licenses have been released to external companies for application development. In this paper we outline the basic algorithm behind the scenes and present a number of applications developed with LearningPinocchio. Then we report about an evaluation performed by an independent company. Finally, we discuss the general suitability of this IE technology for real world applications and draw some conclusion.