An earlier attempt in late 1980's to formalize a rule language resulted in the Common Pattern Specification Language (CPSL) (Appelt and Onyshkevych, 1998).
the community would have shown -objectively -that the problem is not learnable with the available set of constructs, thus motivating follow-on research on extending the standard with new primitives, if possible, or developing novel hybrid IE solutions by leveraging the standard IE rule language together with ML technology.