The Text Analyzer: A tool for knowledge acquisition from texts.

Abstract

The world is being inundated with knowledge at an ever-increasing rate. As intelligent beings and users of knowledge, we must find new ways to locate particular items of information in this huge reservoir of knowledge or we will soon be overwhelmed with enormous quantities of documents that no one any longer has time to read. The vast majority of knowledge is still being stored in conventional text written in natural language, such as books and articles, rather than in more "advanced" forms like knowledge bases. With more and more of these texts being stored on-line rather than solely in print, an opportunity exists to make use of the power of the computer to aid in the location and analysis of knowledge in on-line texts. We propose a tool to do this--the Text Analyzer. We have combined methods from computational linguistics and artificial intelligence to provide the users of the Text Analyzer with a variety of options for finding information in documents, verifying the consistency of this information, performing word and conceptual analyses and other operations. Parsing and indexing are not used in the Text Analyzer. The Text Analyzer can be connected to CODE4, a knowledge management system, so that a knowledge base can be constructed as knowledge is found in the text. We believe this tool will be especially useful for linguists, knowledge engineers, and document specialists.