We propose a new goal for constructing a Chinese phoneme‐to‐character automatic conversion system. Instead of trying to get the largest number of correct characters converted, this goal strives for extracting the correct events from a given sentence. We believe this objective is more fruitful in that the extracted events can be better utilized in other applications such as information retrieval, extraction and dialogue systems. Furthermore, it would motivate researchers to work on the more challenging problem of natural language understanding. An information map is proposed for knowledge representation. These maps give very concise summary of different aspects of an object. They also provide more convenient ways to implement semantic template matching.