SRI International FASTUS System MUC-6 Test Results and Analysis

SRI International participated in the MUC-6 evaluation using the latest version of SRI's FASTUS system [1]. The FASTUS system was originally developed for participation in the MUC-4 evaluation [3] in 1992, and the performance of FASTUS in MUC-4 helped demonstrate the viability of finite state t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Appelt, Douglas E, Hobbs, Jerry R, Bear, John, Israel, David, Kameyama, Megumi, Kehler, Andy, Martin, David, Myers, Karen, Tyson, Mabry
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
CODING
CONFIGURATIONS
FASTUS
Linguistics
NATURAL LANGUAGE
SCENARIOS
TEMPLATES
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Summary:SRI International participated in the MUC-6 evaluation using the latest version of SRI's FASTUS system [1]. The FASTUS system was originally developed for participation in the MUC-4 evaluation [3] in 1992, and the performance of FASTUS in MUC-4 helped demonstrate the viability of finite state technologies in constrained natural-language understanding tasks. The system has undergone significant revision since MUC-4, and it is safe to say that the current system does not share a single line of code with the original. The fundamental ideas behind FASTUS, however, are retained in the current system: an architecture consisting of cascaded finite state transducers, each providing an additional level of analysis of the input, together with merging of the final results. This paper will describe the version of the FASTUS system employed in MUC-6 and highlight the innovations that distinguish it from previous versions described in the literature. SRI used the FASTUS system for each of the MUC-6 tasks: the named entity task, the template- entity task, the coreference task, and the scenario template task. Because a single system, with a single configuration, was used to run all the tasks, and because the first three tasks are in some sense prerequisites to the fourth, we will focus our attention in this paper on the scenario template task.