  This technical memo describes Information Extraction from the point-of-view
of a potential user of the technology. No knowledge of language processing is
assumed. Information Extraction is a process which takes unseen texts as input
and produces fixed-format, unambiguous data as output. This data may be used
directly for display to users, or may be stored in a database or spreadsheet
for later analysis, or may be used for indexing purposes in Information
Retrieval applications. See also http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish
