Inferential information extraction

This paper is concerned with an outlook on information extraction (IE) that is steeped to a large extent in the traditional semantic notion of inferen tial reasoning. We make the case for a continued presence of inferential me thods in IE, despite the ongoing trend towards simpler extraction processin g models. We demonstrate the role of this kind of inference in the Alembic message understanding system, and also discuss the upstream syntactic proce ssing that enables this. We present the finite-state parsing models that un til recently have served this role, and cover at some length the issues of semantic interpretation that they require. As a pointer towards work to com e, we also mention briefly our work in progress on parsing via grammatical relations, an approach that we hope will add great generality to our extrac tion framework.