Embodiments described herein automatically classifies numerical expressions from a textual document and designates a context to understand each numerical expression. Specifically, numerical expressions from a textual context are classified as nominal or cardinal. For cardinal numerical expressions that carry a quantitative meaning, inference terms are determined from the textual context to associate with the cardinal numerical expressions. The numerical expressions are then translated to a format of a numerical value and stored with metadata indicating the unit scale or the meaning of the numerical value.