Extracting database information from e-mail messages

We present an approach to extracting information (IE) from electronic mail messages for addition to a specific data repository. Whereas most IE systems start with a syntactic analysis of the message, our software generates possible sentence structures from the metadata and then pattern matches these structures and generates update statements which can be used to add the new data to the repository. The paper describes an initial version of a component which handles a number of kinds of sentences, and also discusses approaches to working with more complex communications.