Extracting Person Name, Date and Place from Text Documents Using LEX Tool

This paper contains the details of how one can e x tract person name, date and place from a text document using finite state automata and LEX tool. If we sear ch a text document for some important information manually, the process is slow, tedious and error prone. The regular expressions are used to parse textual data to match patterns and extract variables. The lexical analyzer is used in this r e search, which s cans the input program character by character and groups them together to form tokens. This paper describes a technique to perform ident i fication and extraction of information by using LEX tool. It finds the names, date and places that appear in machine - r eadable text document. Regular e x pressions through which required information is extracted are also discussed.