How does it sound to you? Too crazy, too basic?
May be the problem is that having been so long into the forest, I just see the leaves. May be. So let's do something: I tell what I am doing, and you tell me if it is as crazy as it sounds, ok?
My software reads a page in normal English, in a couple of seconds, and extract quite some information, facts. It relates the phrases between them, and produces a consolidated group of facts that are saved in a database. Then you can query: What, when, how much, how many, who, whom, whose, where and which. The why is answered only if the explanation is explicit in the text. The first thing I plan to read is obviously the Wikipedia, but there is no scarcity of sources on the Internet.
Trust me, at a symbolic level, it works, and it has more than 16.000 synonyms to extend the umbrella. At conceptual level it does not, of course, is soft, no hard AI.
Well, that's it.
How does it sound to you? Too crazy, too basic?
Max