This monograph proposes a comprehensive and fully automatic approach to designing text analysis pipelines for arbitrary information needs that are optimal in terms of run-time efficiency and that robustly mine relevant information from text of any kind. Based on state-of-the-art techniques from machine learning and other areas of artificial intelligence, novel pipeline construction and execution algorithms are developed and implemented in prototypical software. Formal analyses of the algorithms and extensive empirical experiments underline that the proposed approach represents an essential...