  In this paper, we describe a method for automatic creation of a knowledge
source for text generation using information extraction over the Internet. We
present a prototype system called PROFILE which uses a client-server
architecture to extract noun-phrase descriptions of entities such as people,
places, and organizations. The system serves two purposes: as an information
extraction tool, it allows users to search for textual descriptions of
entities; as a utility to generate functional descriptions (FD), it is used in
a functional-unification based generation system. We present an evaluation of
the approach and its applications to natural language generation and
summarization.
