Overview of the fourth message understanding evaluation and conference

ABSTRACT

The Fourth Message Understanding Conference (MUC-4) is the latest in a series of conferences that concern the evaluation of natural language processing (NLP) systems. These conferences have reported on progress being made both in the development of systems capable of analyzing relatively short English texts and in the definition of a rigorous performance evaluation methodology. MUC-4 was preceded by a period of intensive system development by each of the participating organizations and blind testing using materials prepared by NRaD and SAIC that are described in this paper, other papers in this volume, and the MUC-3 proceedings [1].

References

1. Proceedings of the Third Message Understanding Conference (MUC-3), May, 1991, Morgan Kaufmann.
2. Sundheim, B., Plans for a Task-Oriented Evaluation of Natural Language Understanding Systems, in Proceedings of the Speech and Natural Language Workshop, February, 1989, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 197--202.
3. Chinchor, N., MUC-4 Evaluation Metrics (in this volume).
4. Lewis, D. and Tong, R., Text Filtering in MUC-3 and MUC-4 (in this volume).
5. Krupka, G. and Rau, L., GE Adjunct Test Report: Object-Oriented Design and Scoring for MUC-4 (in this volume).
6. Hirschman, L., Comparing MUCK-II and MUC-3: Assessing the Difficulty of Different Tasks, in Proceedings of the Third Message Understanding Conference (MUC-3), May, 1991, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 25--30.
7. Chinchor, N., Statistical Significance of MUC-4 Results (in this volume).
8. Chinchor, N., MUC-3 Linguistic Phenomena Test Experiment, in Proceedings of the Third Message Understanding Conference (MUC-3), May, 1991, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 31--45.
9. Hirschman, L., An Adjunct Test for Discourse Processing in MUC-4 (in this volume).
10. Sundheim, B., Overview of the Third Message Understanding Evaluation and Conference, in Proceedings of the Third Message Understanding Conference (MUC-3), May, 1991, Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 3--16.