Content management in the SYNDIKATE system - How technical documents are automatically transformed to text knowledge bases

SYNDIKATE is a family of natural language understanding systems for automatically acquiring knowledge from real-world texts (e.g., information technology test reports, medical finding reports), and for transferring their content to formal representation structures which constitute a corresponding text knowledge base. We present a general system architecture which integrates requirements from the analysis of single sentences, as well as those of referentially linked sentences forming cohesive texts. Properly accounting for text cohesion phenomena is a prerequisite for the soundness and validity of the generated text representation structures. It is also crucial for any information system application making use of automatically generated text knowledge bases in a reliable way, e.g., by inferentially supported fact retrieval. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.