Organizing and accessing a comprehensive knowledge base using the World Wide Web

To address the problem of information overload in today's world, we have developed START, a natural language question answering system that provides users with high-precision information access through the use of natural language annotations. To address the difficulty of accessing large amounts of heterogeneous structured and semistructured data, we have developed Omnibase, which assists START by integrating Web databases into a single, uniformly structured "virtual database." To address the sheer amount of unstructured information available electronically, we have developed techniques for distilling large amounts of free text into relations that capture the salient aspects of the text. The combination of natural language annotation technology, object-property-value data model, and relation extraction technology allows us to rapidly develop and deploy smart applications for knowledge intensive domains. Our ultimate goal is to develop a computer system that acts like a "smart reference librarian," providing users with "just the right information" in response to questions posed in natural language.