Abstract
Our research examines text knowledge: the knowledge encoded in text and the knowledge about a text. We approach text knowledge from different perspectives, describing the theories and techniques that have been applied to extracting, representing and deploying this knowledge, and propose some novel techniques that may enhance the understanding of text knowledge. These techniques include the concept of virtual corpus hierarchies, hybrid symbolic and connectionist representation and reasoning, text analysis and self-organising corpora. We present these techniques in a framework that embraces the different facets of text knowledge as a whole, be it corpus organisation and text identification, text analysis, or knowledge representation and reasoning. This framework comprises three phases, that of organisation, analysis and evaluation of text, where a single text might be a complete work, a technical term, or even a single letter. The techniques proposed are demonstrated by implementations of computer systems and some experiments based on these implementations: the Quirk Experiments. Through these experiments we show how the highly interconnected nature of text knowledge can be reduced or abstracted for specific purposes, from a range of techniques based on explicit symbolic representations and self-organising connectionist schemes.