Information extraction is the process of automatically pulling structured information out of unstructured sources, such as free-flowing text, scanned documents, or images, and converting it into a organized, machine-usable format. It typically combines several natural language processing techniques, including entity recognition, relationship extraction, and event detection, to identify specific facts within a larger body of text.
ChatGPT and similar models use information extraction techniques internally as part of interpreting a user's input, identifying the key facts, entities, and intent buried in a prompt before generating a relevant response. The same underlying capability powers many practical business applications too, such as automatically pulling structured invoice data from scanned receipts or extracting names and dates from legal contracts at scale.
