This paper is concerned with an outlook on information extraction (IE) that is steeped to a large extent in the traditional semantic notion of inferential reasoning. We make the case for a continued presence of inferential methods in IE, despite the ongoing trend towards simpler extraction processing models. We demonstrate the role of this kind of inference in the Alembic message understanding system, and also discuss the upstream syntactic processing that enables this. We present the finite-state parsing models that until recently have served this role, and cover at some length the issues of semantic interpretation that they require. As a pointer towards work to come, we also mention briefly our work in progress on parsing via grammatical relations, an approach that we hope will add great generality to our extraction framework.