Text is intelligently annotated by first creating a topic map summarizing topics of interest of the user. A data structure is created. The topic map is used to create two linked user dictionaries, a topic dictionary reflecting topic names and a traversal dictionary reflecting the knowledge structure of a topic. Actions may be linked with topic types. When the text to be annotated is being read, the topic data structure of the topics found in the text are automatically instantiated using the dictionaries and any actions previously linked to topic types. Instantiated topic data structures are automatically attached to the text being annotated. A user GUI may be created to allow the user to access and interact with the text annotations.