This dissertation studies information extraction (IE), the problem of extracting structured information from unstructured data. Example IE tasks include extracting person names from news articles, product information from e-commerce Web pages, street addresses from emails, and names of emerging music bands from blogs. IE is all increasingly…

In 1987, the Chancellor's Office of the California Community Colleges (CCC) began implementation of the Management Information System (MIS) to improve its data collection and analysis capabilities by utilizing electronic mail communications systemwide. Specifically, the project seeks to replace paper copies of data generated for reporting…