Proteus and Pundit

We are engaged in the development of systems capable of analyzing short narrative messages dealing with a limited domain and extracting the information contained in the narrative. These systems are initially being applied to messages describing equipment failure. This work is a joint effort of New York University and the System Development Corp. for the Strategic Computing Program. Our aim is to create a system reliable enough for use in an operational environment. This is a formidable task, both because the texts are unedited (and so contain various errors) and because the complexity of any real domain precludes us from assembling a "complete" collection of the relationships and domain knowledge relevant to understanding texts in the domain.