WizIE: A Best Practices Guided Development Environment for Information Extraction

Information extraction (IE) is becoming a critical building block in many enterprise applications. In order to satisfy the increasing text analytics demands of enterprise applications, it is crucial to enable developers with general computer science background to develop high quality IE extractors. In this demonstration, we present WizIE, an IE development environment intended to reduce the development life cycle and enable developers with little or no linguistic background to write high quality IE rules. WizIE provides an integrated wizard-like environment that guides IE developers step-by-step throughout the entire development process, based on best practices synthesized from the experience of expert developers. In addition, WizIE reduces the manual effort involved in performing key IE development tasks by offering automatic result explanation and rule discovery functionality. Preliminary results indicate that WizIE is a step forward towards enabling extractor development for novice IE developers.