TIDES

The Online Journalism Review has an article about Newsblaster which is the result of a DARPA funded project called TIDES.

http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?id=690

TIDES is an ambitious technology development effort focused on the automated processing and understanding of a variety of human language data. The primary goal is to make it possible for English speakers to find and interpret needed information quickly and effectively regardless of language or medium.
http://www.arpa.mil/ito/research/tides/

Our objective is to develop a new generation of language analysis software that will multi-lingually and translingually analyze, categorize, and conceptually index gigabytes of text/hour, detecting topics, extracting entities and relations, automatically linking related documents and knowledge, and spotting important/novel information. The result will be multi-modal content-based analysis of a collection of documents using textual labels, running text, tables, geo-displays, timelines, and link displays. The primary target for demonstrations will be news.
http://www.arpa.mil/ito/psum2000/J288-0.html

A list of all the projects associated with TIDES:
http://www.arpa.mil/ito/research/tides/projlist.html

A demo of the TIDES technology called Newsblaster:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/

Columbia University is also working on a project called PERSIVAL. Healthcare consumers and providers both need quick and easy access to a wide range of online resources. The goal of this project is to provide personalized access to a distributed patient care digital library through the development of a system, PERSIVAL.

All projects (which include things like automatic summerization, multimedia generation and corpus annotation).
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/projects.html

PERSIVAL:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/diglib/PERSIVAL/