Abstract: Systems and methods disclosed herein efficiently infer information from structured and/or unstructured data, and/or efficiently perform natural language processing (NLP) of unstructured textual data. In one aspect. an NLP inference engine generates inferences from data records in a transactional manner (i.e., substantially in real time). The NLP inference engine automatically calls an NLP analytics engine to handle unstructured textual data within the data records. In another aspect. an NLP analytics engine executes a multi-thread mapping process that uses knowledge maps to map features of unstructured textual data to “candidate” feature attributes. and generates “accepted” feature attributes based at least in part on the candidate feature attributes.