Abstract. We investigate the application of classification techniques to the problem of information extraction (IE). In particular we use support vector machines and several different feature-sets to build a set of classifiers for IE. We show that this approach is competitive with current state-of-the-art IE algorithms based on specialized learning algorithms. We also introduce a new technique for improving the recall of our IE algorithm. This approach uses a two-level ensemble of classifiers to improve the recall of the extracted fragments while maintaining high precision. We show that this approach outperforms current state-of-the-art IE algorithms on several benchmark IE tasks.