  With the advent of the Internet, large amount of digital text is generated
everyday in the form of news articles, research publications, blogs, question
answering forums and social media. It is important to develop techniques for
extracting information automatically from these documents, as lot of important
information is hidden within them. This extracted information can be used to
improve access and management of knowledge hidden in large text corpora.
Several applications such as Question Answering, Information Retrieval would
benefit from this information. Entities like persons and organizations, form
the most basic unit of the information. Occurrences of entities in a sentence
are often linked through well-defined relations; e.g., occurrences of person
and organization in a sentence may be linked through relations such as employed
at. The task of Relation Extraction (RE) is to identify such relations
automatically. In this paper, we survey several important supervised,
semi-supervised and unsupervised RE techniques. We also cover the paradigms of
Open Information Extraction (OIE) and Distant Supervision. Finally, we describe
some of the recent trends in the RE techniques and possible future research
directions. This survey would be useful for three kinds of readers - i)
Newcomers in the field who want to quickly learn about RE; ii) Researchers who
want to know how the various RE techniques evolved over time and what are
possible future research directions and iii) Practitioners who just need to
know which RE technique works best in various settings.
