People want to know! And so do government agencies, information providers, search-and-retrieval companies, electronic publishers, corporate enterprises, and business-intelligence professionals. But they're swamped with volumes of unstructured data spewed forth from search engines, corporate intranets, news feeds, and the increasing global Internet. They want critical information extracted automatically at the level of a human expert. Critical information is difficult to locate. Once located, its incompatible formats make it difficult to use effectively. Large volumes of unstructured text must be digested into an easy-to-use, organized, uniform format to support querying, focused searching, personalized information products, and on-line transaction systems. The challenges are: automatic search, automatic extraction, automatic integration, automatic analysis, and automatic summarization � so that people can concentrate on tasks that require human intelligence.