The symposium on which this volume was based brought together approximately fifty scientists from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the rapidly-emerging set of competing technologies for exploiting a massive quantity of textual information. This group was challenged to explore new ways to take advantage of the power of on-line text. A billion words of text can be more generally useful than a few hundred logical rules, if advanced computation can extract useful information from streams of text and help find what is needed in the sea of available material. While the extraction task is a hot...