A system and method that facilitates authoring of a Bayesian Belief Networks by: accessing text content stored in a content storage device; identifying statements within said accessed text content indicating a dependence relation; extracting said statements indicating said dependence relation from said text content; and aggregating said extracted statements into a form suitable for representation as a BBN network structure. To identify statements indicating a dependence relation, the method includes identifying one or more lexical and semantic attributes of variables within a text unit indicating a conditional dependence relation between two or more variables. The method further processes the text content to extract probabilistic information and probability statements and aggregate the probability statements into a quantitative layer of the BBN structure.