Automatic acquisition of biographic knowledge from encyclopedic texts

Automatically acquiring knowledge from encyclopedic texts, specifically the biographies of famous people found in the World Book Encyclopedia, begins with an electronic version of the text of a biography and ends with knowledge structures representing the knowledge that has been acquired. This acquisition process is performed without human assistance of any kind and thus involves not only issues in the area of knowledge acquisition, but also issues in natural language understanding and knowledge representation. We describe one problem from each of these two areas: interpretation of deverbal nominalizations and representation of the a priori knowledge required by the semantic interpreter. The results of two comprehensive experiments are presented in this article, which show that these problems can be solved on the way to near human performance in answering a large set of questions. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved.