Coupling information retrieval and information extraction: A new text technology for gathering information from the web

The techniques of information retrieval and information extraction are complementary, but to date there has been little concrete work aimed at integrating the two. We describe how each of these techniques contributes to the process of transferring information from generator to user, summarise the issues which must be addressed if they are to work together, and report the results of some preliminary experiments on coupling them which indicate that these technologies can be jointly used to construct a structured data resource from free text on the WWW.