Interoperability of cross-lingual and cross-document event detection

Abstract

We describe a system for event extraction across documents and languages. We developed a framework for the interoperable semantic interpretation of mentions of events, participants, locations and time, as well as the relations between them. Furthermore, we use a common RDF model to represent instances of events and normalised entities and dates. We convert multiple mentions of the same event in English, Spanish and Dutch to a single representation. We thus resolve cross-document event and entity coreference within a language but also across languages. We tested our system on a Wikinews corpus of 120 English articles that have been manually translated to Spanish and Dutch. We report on the cross-lingual cross-document event and entity extraction comparing the Spanish and Dutch output with respect to English.