Extracting Knowledge from Biological Descriptions

We describe a system which performs biological identification on the basis of natural language descriptions. The system parses texts containing large sets of biological descriptions in restricted natural language and constructs a knowledge base. The system can semi-automatically adapt to a text by extending its lexicon and perhaps its grammar. The constructed knowledge bases are used to perform interactive identification of specimens. The system automatically constructs HTML forms to provide a a World Wide Web identification interface which can be integrated with hypermedia resources. We describe the system's implementation and its performance on two large botany texts