piece of information even when a trigger prefix is not present for example the phrase u201c talk to you later bye u201d is often a post facto signal that a phone number has been provided when the words immediately preceding the phrase are a sequence of numbers in this embodiment of the invention trigger prefixes and suffixes may be used either separately or combined together into larger composite patterns the operation of word classing is also inherent in this embodiment of the invention for example a set of personal names such as those found in a phone book may be identified a a u201c person name u201d class subsequently patterns of the form u201c hi it 39 s lt person name gt u201d can be matched and the words matching the u201c person name u201d tokens can be displayed as the caller it is to be understood by those skilled in the art that there are numerous ways of combining trigger prefixes and suffixes word classes and other pattern matching operations such as the use of multiple states each with its own set of matchable patterns as may be done in flex in order to identify and extract information in addition to being used as a.