KET 2015 Chairs’ Welcome

Text understanding is an old, but as yet unsolved, AI problem consisting of a number of nontrivial steps. The critical step in solving the problem is knowledge acquisition from text, ie a transition from a nonformalized text into a formalized language that drives computer actions. Many of required steps in the text understanding pipeline, including linguistic processing, reasoning, text generation, search, question answering etc., are already solved to a degree that allows composition of text understanding services. We know that knowledge acquisition, the key bottleneck, can be done by humans, but automating of the process is still out of reach in its full breadth. In recent years interest in text understanding and knowledge acquisition from text has been growing. Many AI research groups are addressing relevant aspects of computational linguistics, machine learning, probabilistic and logical reasoning, and the semantic …