Learning by reading: a prototype system, performance baseline and lessons learned

Abstract

A traditional goal of Artificial Intelligence research has been a system that can read unrestricted natural language texts on a given topic, build a model of that topic and reason over the model. Natural Language Processing advances in syntax and semantics have made it possible to extract a limited form of meaning from sentences. Knowledge Representation research has shown that it is possible to model and reason over topics in interesting areas of human knowledge. It is useful for these two communities to reunite periodically to see where we stand with respect to the common goal of text understanding. In this paper, we describe a coordinated effort among researchers from the Natural Language and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning communities. We routed the