Transforming unstructured or semi-structured information into structured knowledge is one of the big challenges of today’s knowledge society. While this abstract goal is still unreached and probably unreachable, intelligent information extraction techniques are considered key ingredients on the way to generating and representing knowledge for a wide variety of applications. This is especially true for the current efforts to turn the World Wide Web being the world’s largest collection of information into the world’s largest knowledge base. This introduction gives a broad overview about the major topics and current trends in information extraction.
