Business analysis activity often involves the identification and extraction of information from business
reports. The unstructured content of business reports poses a challenge to current Business
Intelligence technologies. In this paper, we present an application that provides passage retrieval
capability, which has been developed for use in business analysis activity at Hewlett-Packard¿ (HP).
Preliminary evaluation of the application indicates that the inclusion of domain knowledge such as
domain semantics and business intelligence rules plays an important part in system performance. It
dramatically reduces the time that analysts spend extracting relevant informative passages within a
report or business intelligence. In addition, it can find further relevant information that would have
been overlooked by the analyst.peer-reviewe