Adapting the PULS event extraction framework to analyze Russian text

This paper describes a plug-in component to extend the PULS information extraction framework to analyze Russian-language text. PULS is a comprehensive framework for information extraction (IE) that is used for analysis of news in several scenarios from English-language text and is primarily monolingual. Although monolinguality is recognized as a serious limitation, building an IE system for a new language from the bottom up is very labor-intensive. Thus, the objective of the present work is to explore whether the base framework can be extended to cover additional languages with limited effort, and to leverage the preexisting PULS modules as far as possible, in order to accelerate the development process. The component for Russian analysis is described and its performance is evaluated on two news-analysis scenarios: epidemic surveillance and cross-border security. The approach described in the paper can be generalized to a range of heavilyinflected languages.