One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that detects
inferences from documents. During operation, the system receives one or
more documents and extracts a first set of knowledge relevant to the
documents. The system further formulates one or more queries to one or
more reference corpora based on the first set of knowledge. The system
then extracts a second set of knowledge from results received in response
to the queries. Additionally, the system produces a mapping relationship
between at least one document and a piece of the second set of knowledge
which is not within the first set of knowledge, the mapping relationship
indicating an inference from the documents.