  We ask whether text understanding has progressed to where we may extract
event information through incremental refinement of bleached statements derived
from annotation manuals. Such a capability would allow for the trivial
construction and extension of an extraction framework by intended end-users
through declarations such as, "Some person was born in some location at some
time." We introduce an example of a model that employs such statements, with
experiments illustrating we can extract events under closed ontologies and
generalize to unseen event types simply by reading new definitions.
