12. An information extraction module (IEM) comprising: a computer device; and an algorithm recorded in memory of the computer device and executable by the computer device, wherein the computer device executes the algorithm to thereby: receive and record an input block of unstructured text; discover text phrases contained in the received input block of unstructured text; access and retrieve lexical data from a knowledge source using the discovered text phrases; process the discovered text phrases and the retrieved lexical data to thereby generate a plurality of nodes in the domain-specific ontology; map sub-phrases of the discovered text phrases into the domain-specific ontology; use an informativeness function to quantify the sub-phrases by their relative informativeness as a normalized value between 0 and 1; and eliminate all quantified sub-phrases from the domain-specific ontology having a normalized value that is less than a calibrated threshold; wherein each of the plurality of nodes classifies the unstructured text to predetermined corresponding objects of interest, thereby transforming the unstructured text into the structured data.
14. The IEM of claim 12 , wherein the IEM automatically expands a list of synonyms using a general thesaurus.