How does Apple find dates and times in emails?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9294926/how-does-apple-find-dates-times-and-addresses-in-emails/9344555

by elchief • 14 years ago

108 9 14 years ago

stackoverflow.com

papercruncher• 14 years ago

The timex module in NLTK contrib does a fairly good job at that but uses regular expressions

https://github.com/nltk/nltk_contrib/blob/master/nltk_contri...

bdunn• 14 years ago

I created a (now defunct) product called Inbox Assistant which would parse plain text emails and create events automatically in your calendar.

I had to figure out how to do essentially what Apple does, and I'm by no means a computer scientist. Here's what I learned: http://blog.myinboxassistant.com/post/9613650483/experimenti...

zaroth• 14 years ago

Link should point here: http://www.miramontes.com/writing/add-cacm/

Wilya• 14 years ago

Note this is from around 1998. And it seems heavily grammar based.

Things might have changed, since the hardware has become more powerful, and some statistical techniques have proven pretty good at Named-Entity recognition.

huxley2• 14 years ago

It's possible that the current ones are still based on the work of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. Apple used HTC over its patents and this article about the suit mentioned the technology being added back in 10.5:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?t=138975

ashwinl• 14 years ago

from the stackoverflow link, helpful video on machine learning: http://videolectures.net/mlas06_nigam_tie/

The 14 min mark alludes to the question above.

huxley2• 14 years ago

Apple's Advanced Technology Group had a few projects that dealt with processing text to discover information structure. Jim Miller who was part of ATG has written a few articles about the work they did:

Data Detectors: http://www.miramontes.com/writing/add-cacm/

LiveDoc: http://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/

DropZones: http://www.miramontes.com/writing/dropzones/

Oops ... didn't notice zaroth's earlier link http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3633077 to the Miramontes articles, sorry for the dupe.

jonhendry• 14 years ago

lsm(1) - Latent Semantic Mapping tool

foobarbazetc• 14 years ago

This is called Timex tagging. See http://www.timeml.org/ etc.

I believe DARPA runs some sort of competition every year or so where different algorithms are submitted to extract temporal data from text.

How does Apple find dates and times in emails?

Related Stories