SMES, is an information extraction core system for real world German text processing. The basic design criterion of the
system is of providing a set of basic powerful, robust, and efficient natural language components and generic linguistic
knowledge sources which can easily be customized for processing different tasks in a  flexible manner.
The main components of SMES are:

* a scanner which maps an ascci text into a sequence of tokens
* a very fast and robust morphological component (including robust compound analysis)
* cascaded chunk parser based on finite state grammars for
o named entity recognition
o phrase recognition (NPs, PPs, and verbgroups)