SRA: description of the SOLOMON system as used for MUC-5

SRA's knowledge-based natural language processing system SOLOMON has been developed for text understanding since 1986. In addition to being a domain-independent NLP system, starting in the fall of 1990, SOLOMON has been extended as part of the MURASAKI project to become a multi-lingual text understanding system. It currently understands Spanish and Japanese as well as English texts. In order to achieve domain- and language-independence, SOLOMON separates data from processing modules. The processing modules do not assume any domain- or language-dependent facts; rather they are designed so that they work off separate data, i.e. lexicons, grammars, patterns, and knowledge bases, which vary according to the domain or language. To facilitate data acquisition, SRA has developed 2 tools: LEXTool for the development of lexicons and KBTool for the development of knowledge bases.