Faust: Flexible Acquistion and Understanding System for Text

Abstract : The vast majority of scientific and technical knowledge is expressed in natural-language (NL) texts. Our objective was to create an automated reading system that makes the knowledge in NL texts accessible to any of an open-ended range of formal reasoning systems. Our approach was based on large-scale statistical (probabilistic) joint inference over relational models. This vision involved a radical re-thinking of the architecture for Machine Reading systems.