Information Extraction as a core language technology What is IE?

Information Extraction (IE) technology is now coming on to the market and is of great significance to information enduser industries of all kinds, especially finance companies, banks, publishers and governments. For instance, finance companies want to know facts of the following sort and on a large scale: what company takeovers happened in a given time span; they want widely scattered text information reduced to a simple data base. Lloyds of London need to know of daily ship sinkings throughout the world and pay large numbers of people to locate them in newspapers in a wide range of languages. All these are prima facie cases for what we are calling IE.