A processor is connected to a storage device storing an incoming e-mail, a
dependency database, and code for a calendar application. The dependency
database can be built from an e-mail corpus containing a plurality of
natural language e-mails containing scheduling information. The incoming
e-mail is parsed by the processor to build a dependency tree containing
word pairs from the e-mail that are found in the dependency tree. The
word pairs are stored as dependency pairs in a tree structure in the
dependency tree. A probability sum for the dependency tree is calculated
to determine if the e-mail contains scheduling information. If the
probability sum exceeds a predetermined value, the e-mail is assumed to
contain scheduling information and the scheduling information is
extracted from the dependency tree and exported to the calendar
application.