One feature of the present invention uses the parsing capabilities of a structured language model in the information extraction process. During training, the structured language model is first initialized with syntactically annotated training data. The model is then trained by generating parses on semantically annotated training data enforcing annotated constituent boundaries. The syntactic labels in the parse trees generated by the parser are then replaced with joint syntactic and semantic labels. The model is then trained by generating parses on the semantically annotated training data enforcing the semantic tags or labels found in the training data. The trained model can then be used to extract information from test data using the parses generated by the model.