The Murasaki project

This paper describes a multilingual data extraction system under development for the Department of Defense (DoD). The system, called Murasaki, processes Spanish and Japanese newspaper articles reporting AIDS disease statistics. Key to Murasaki's design is its language-independent and domain-independent architecture. The system consists of shared processing modules across the three languages it currently handles (English, Japanese, and Spanish), shared general and domain-specific knowledge bases, and separate data modules for language-specific knowledge such as grammars, lexicons, morphological data and discourse data. This data-driven architecture is crucial to the success of Murasaki as a language-independent system; extending Murasaki to additional languages can be done for the most part merely by adding new data. Some of the data can be added with user-friendly tools, others by exploiting existing on-line data or by deriving relevant data from corpora.