Lathos pointed me at GATE - General Architecture for Text Engineering, which looks pretty cool.
He also pointed at his very cool Lingua::EN::NamedEntity module which looks very interesting.
I also found some interesting essays on the global interweb highway :
Mining dates from historical documents by Dana Mckay (University of Waikato)
and
SEMIAUTOMATIC GENERATION OF RESILIENT DATA-EXTRACTION ONTOLOGIES by Yihong Ding
Re:Bad link
TeeJay on 2003-09-27T18:17:58
wierd - it worked for me and I didn't put in a password.