The present invention relates generally to automatically processing electronic documents. In one aspect, features and/or properties of words are identified from a set of training documents to aid in extracting information from documents to be processed. The features and/or properties relate to text of the words, position of the words and the relationship to other words. A classifier is developed to express these features and/or properties. During information extraction, documents are processed and analyzed based on the classifier and information is extracted based on correspondence of the documents and the features/properties expressed by the classifier.