This lecture delves into the concepts of Text Understanding, exploring the transition from Distant Reading to Machine Reading. It covers Close Reading, Surface Reading, and Distant Reading methods, emphasizing the importance of Named Entities and Information Extraction. The instructor discusses the evolution of Named Entity recognition, the role of knowledge bases, and the challenges in operationalizing text analysis. The lecture also touches on large-scale projects like Cyc and NELL, showcasing the potential of Open Information Extraction and the Never Ending Language Learning system.