Example implementations involve a framework for knowledge base construction of components and problems in short texts. The framework extracts domain-specific components and problems from textual corpora such as service manuals, repair records, and public Q/A forums using: 1) domain-specific syntactic rules leveraging part of speech tagging (POS), and 2) a neural attention-based seq2seq model which tags raw sentences end-to-end identifying components and their associated problems. Once acquired, this knowledge can be leveraged to accelerate the development and deployment of intelligent conversational assistants for various industrial AI scenarios (e.g., repair recommendation, operations, and so on) through better understanding of user utterances. The example implementations give better tagging accuracy on various datasets outperforming well known off-the-shelf systems.