Knowledge-based multilingual document analysis

The growing availability of multilingual resources, like EuroWordnet, has recently inspired the development of large scale linguistic technologies, e.g. multilingual IE and Q&A, that were considered infeasible until a few years ago. In this paper a system for categorisation and automatic authoring of news streams in different languages is presented. In our system, a knowledge-based approach to Information Extraction is adopted as a support for hyperlinking. Authoring across documents in different languages is triggered by Named Entities and event recognition. The matching of events in texts is carried out by discourse processing driven by a large scale world model. This kind of multilingual analysis relies on a lexical knowledge base of nouns(i.e. the EuroWordnet Base Concepts) shared among English, Spanish and Italian lexicons. The impact of the design choices on the language independence and the possibilities it opens for automatic learning of the event hierarchy will be discussed.