This book develops concise and comprehensive concepts for extracting degree information from natural language texts. First, an overview of the ParseTalk information extraction system is given. Then, from the review of relevant linguistic literature, the author derives two distinct categories of natural language degree expressions and proposes knowledge-intensive algorithms to handle their analyses in the ParseTalk system. Moreover, for inferencing the author generalizes from well-known constraint propagation mechanisms. The concepts and methods developed are applied to text domains from medical diagnosis and information technology magazines. The conclusion of the book gives an integration of all three levels of understanding resulting in more advanced and more efficient information extraction mechanisms.
