An overview of TOPIC is provided, a knowledge-based text information system for the analysis of German-language texts. TOPIC supplies text condensates (summaries) on variable degrees of generality and makes available facts acquired from the texts. The presentation focuses on the major methodological principles underlying the design of TOPIC: a frame representation model that incorporates various integrity constraints, text parsing with focus on text cohesion and text coherence properties of expository texts, a lexically distributed semantic text grammar in the format of word experts, a model of partial text parsing, and text graphs as appropriate representation structures for text condensates.
['Udo Hahn', 'Ulrich Reimer']
Topic essentials