Learning by reading is a term that may refer to any number
of tasks involving the interpretation of natural language
texts. Our task is to build a formal representation of a
specific, coherent topic through deep processing of concise
texts focused on that topic. This is in contrast to
unrestricted text understanding, which attempts to extract
as much knowledge as possible from what is explicitly
expressed in given texts. Unrestricted text understanding is
a much more challenging form of learning by reading than
our task. In particular, our target topic is known and the
vocabulary and required depth of the formal representation