Int. J. Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2010 33 A knowledge based approach for capturing rich semantic representations from text for intelligent systems Peter Z. Yeh*, Colin A. Puri and Alex Kass Accenture Technology Labs, San Jose CA 95113, USA E-mail: peter.z.yeh@accenture.com E-mail: colin.puri@accenture.com E-mail: alex.kass@accenture.com *Corresponding author Abstract: In this paper, we present a knowledge based approach to capture semantic representations from text for intelligent systems that know the representations of interest in advance. Our approach performs this task by generating phrases from these representations and then matching these phrases against text using a set of syntactic and semantic transformations. The representation that best matches a piece of text is selected as its meaning. We evaluate our approach in the context of a real-world intelligent system that tracks the maturity of wireless technologies, and show how our approach performs well on capturing semantic representations from text. Keywords: knowledge based systems; natural language understanding; ontology; web mining. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Yeh, P.Z., Puri, C.A. and Kass, A. (2010) ‘A knowledge based approach for capturing rich semantic representations from text for intelligent systems’, Int. J. Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp.33–48. Biographical notes: Peter Z. Yeh has been a researcher at Accenture Technology Labs in Silicon Valley since 2006, after obtaining his PhD from The Department of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. At Accenture Technology Labs, He is responsible for defining and leading research projects that apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance business capabilities such as technology assessment, competitive intelligence, and management of information and data. He research focuses on artificial intelligence, knowledge-based technologies, and natural language understanding; and he has published numerous papers in these areas. He also regularly reviews for and serves on the program committees of various AI conferences. Colin A. Puri is a researcher at Accenture Technology Labs in Silicon Valley. His interests and work focuses on artificial intelligence, electronics, hardware design and construction, imaging, ubiquitous computing, and robotics. Since obtaining his masters from the University of Houston, he has researched and implemented biometrics technologies in academia Copyright © 2010 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.