Typical inputs to IE include newspaper articles or news-feeds, incident reports, technical paper abstracts, or similar documents. Information Extraction is a natural language processing technology which is NOT the same as Information Retrieval or Document Retrieval, but can further process the results of retrieval by those techniques. Regaining access to legacy of information latent in unstructured text. Input to data mining or data visualisation methods. Highlight is SRI Cambridge's natural language processing system for information extraction from text.
Highlight takes input texts and extracts information to fill slots in a template.
A slot is an empty place in a table where some information can be placed. A template is like a form to fill in. It contains a number of slots which are completed automatically by the IE engine as it scans the texts. This method of extracting information by filling in forms ensures that only relevant information is discovered. Highlight can be used in any application where large quantities of text would otherwise have to be read by an expert.