  This paper describes a machine learning and data science pipeline for
structured information extraction from documents, implemented as a suite of
open-source tools and extensions to existing tools. It centers around a
methodology for extracting procedural information in the form of recipes,
stepwise procedures for creating an artifact (in this case synthesizing a
nanomaterial), from published scientific literature. From our overall goal of
producing recipes from free text, we derive the technical objectives of a
system consisting of pipeline stages: document acquisition and filtering,
payload extraction, recipe step extraction as a relationship extraction task,
recipe assembly, and presentation through an information retrieval interface
with question answering (QA) functionality. This system meets computational
information and knowledge management (CIKM) requirements of metadata-driven
payload extraction, named entity extraction, and relationship extraction from
text. Functional contributions described in this paper include semi-supervised
machine learning methods for PDF filtering and payload extraction tasks,
followed by structured extraction and data transformation tasks beginning with
section extraction, recipe steps as information tuples, and finally assembled
recipes. Measurable objective criteria for extraction quality include precision
and recall of recipe steps, ordering constraints, and QA accuracy, precision,
and recall. Results, key novel contributions, and significant open problems
derived from this work center around the attribution of these holistic quality
measures to specific machine learning and inference stages of the pipeline,
each with their performance measures. The desired recipes contain identified
preconditions, material inputs, and operations, and constitute the overall
output generated by our computational information and knowledge management
(CIKM) system.
