Abstract: An automatic document validation system that can be trained to extract domain-specific entities and their linguistically-associated physical, abstract or relational properties, as described within an electronic document. Training of the system can be achieved through the provision of a set of example documents representative of the domain and that have been manually tagged by a domain expert in such a way as to identify the various types of entities and their associated set of recordable properties. Together with a domain-specific vocabulary (e.g.. a dictionary), the trained system is then able to automatically process new documents belonging to the same domain and to test the extracted information on any number of content-conditional rules that have been specified by the domain expert as necessary to confirm the completeness and validity of the new documents.