E-mail signature block analysis

The signature block is a common structured component found in e-mail messages. Accurate identification and analysis of signature blocks are important in many multimedia messaging and information retrieval applications such as e-mail text-to-speech rendering. Traditional text analysis methods designed to deal with sequential text cannot handle 2D structures, while the highly unconstrained nature of signature blocks makes the application of 2D grammars very difficult. In this paper we describe an algorithm for signature block analysis which combines 2D structural segmentation with 1D grammatical constraints. The information obtained from both geometrical and linguistic analysis are integrated in a form of weighted finite state transducers, and the final solution is the optimal interpretation under both constraints.