Acknowledgments are widely used in scientific articles to express gratitude and credit collaborators. Despite suggestions that indexing acknowledgments automatically will give interesting insights [9] , there is currently, to the best of our knowledge, no such system to track acknowledgments and index them 1 . In this paper we introduce AckSeer 2 , a search engine and a repository for automatically extracted acknowledgments in digital libraries. AckSeer is a fully automated system that scans

more »

... ms in digital libraries including conference papers, journals, and books extracting acknowledgment sections and identifying acknowledged entities mentioned within. We describe the architecture of AckSeer and discuss the extraction algorithms that achieve a F1 measure above 83%. We use multiple Named Entity Recognition (NER) tools and propose a method for merging the outcome from different recognizers. The resulting entities are stored in a database then made searchable by adding them to the AckSeer index along with the metadata of the containing paper/book. We buildAckSeer on top of the documents in CiteSeerx digital library yielding more than 500,000 acknowledgments and more than 4 million mentioned entities. 1 An early acknowledgement indexing system was built in CiteSeer but was not refactored into the new CiteSeerX 2