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 and emerging information engineering technologies like data mining, intelligent data analysis, and text summarization, IE will play a crucial role for scientists and professionals as well as other end-users who have to deal with vast amounts of information, for example from the Internet. As the first book solely devoted to IE, it is of relevance to anybody interested in new and emerging trends in information processing technology.