PROTEUS and PUNDIT: Research in Text Understanding

We are engaged in the deve lopment of systems capable of analyzing short narrat ive messages dealing with a limited domain and extract ing the informat ion conta ined in the narrat ive. These systems are initially being applied to messages describing equ ipmen t failure. This work is a joint e f fo r t of New York Universi ty and the System Deve lopmen t Corp . for the Strategic Computing Program. Our aim is to create a system reliable enough for use in an operat ional envi ronment . This is a formidable task, both because the texts are unedi ted (and so contain various errors) and because the complexi ty of any real domain precludes us from assembling a "complete" collection of the relationships and domain knowledge relevant to understanding texts in the domain.