A system, method and computer program product for scalable, rule-based processing, including an automaton builder for constructing automatons corresponding to trigger rules and word lists that are employed by the trigger rules, and a rule evaluator for evaluating any of the trigger rules with respect to an input document by selecting any of the automatons to evaluate a given one of the trigger rules, parsing the input document using the selected automatons, determining whether conditions of the given trigger rule are met, and identifying any actions that are associated with the given trigger rule.