Important sources of information are originally created in
natural language. To make that knowledge computer processable it is
necessary to understand the structure of natural languages, by adding
lexical and syntactic information; to have a rich representation to encode
the knowledge of sentences, like ontologies; and to develop algorithms
to bridge the gap between natural languages and computer processable
representations. In this paper we present the architecture, modules and
results of a prototype that uses an ontology to represent the world concepts and their relationships, and also to guide the process of extracting
information from natural language documents.
The system was tested using minutes of Portuguese municipalities’ meetings. Initial results are presented for three topics of municipalities' affairs:
the subsidies granted, the building permits requested, and the existing
protocols with other institutions
