Can We Make Information Extraction More Adaptive? -- Natural Language Processing and Digital Libraries -- Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval -- From Speech to Knowledge -- Relating Templates to Language and Logic -- Inferential Information Extraction -- Knowledge Extraction from Bilingual Corpora -- Engineering of IE Systems: An Object-Oriented Approach.

Information extraction (IE) is a new technology enabling relevant content to be extracted from textual information available electronically. IE essentially builds on natural language processing and computational linguistics, but it is also closely related to the well established area of information retrieval and involves learning. In concert with other promising intelligent information processing technologies like data mining, intelligent data analysis, text summarization, and information agents, IE plays a crucial role in dealing with the vast amounts of information accessible electronically, for example from the Internet. The book is based on the Second International School on Information Extraction, SCIE-99, held in Frascati near Rome, Italy in June/July 1999.