Researching persons & organizations: AWAKE: From text to an entity-centric knowledge base

We describe a pilot experiment building a capability to automatically read documents, develop a knowledge base, support analytics, and visualize the information found. The capability allows someone researching a topic of interest of focus on analysis and synthesis rather than on reading. We show how information from multiple modalities (speech, text, structured databases) and multiple approaches (ontology driven and open information extraction) can be fused to create a resource about both previously known and novel entities. We describe an extensible framework for language understanding tools that allows for scalability, plug-and-play of alternative components, and incorporation of additional input streams, including video, images, and foreign language text.