"Information extraction (IE) is a new technology which enables 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."--BOOK JACKET. "By investigating the general structures of natural language and logic as well as relevant software engineering methodologies, the lectures presented in this book attempt the development of principled techniques for domain-independent IE. The book is based on the Second International School on Information Extraction, SCIE-99, held in Frascati near Rome, Italy in June/July 1999."--BOOK JACKET.