The Message Understanding Conferences (MUC) for
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...
and
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
, were initiated and financed by
DARPA
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.
Originally known as the Ad ...
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to encourage the development of new and better methods of
information extraction
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...
. The character of this competition, many concurrent research teams competing against one another—required the development of standards for evaluation, e.g. the adoption of metrics like
precision and recall.
Topics and exercises
Only for the first conference (MUC-1) could the participant choose the output format for the extracted
information. From the second conference the output format, by which the participants'
systems would be evaluated, was prescribed. For each topic fields were given, which had to be
filled with information
from the text. Typical fields were, for example, the cause, the agent, the time and place of an event,
the consequences etc. The number of fields increased from conference to conference.
At the sixth conference (MUC-6) the task of recognition of
named entities and
coreference
In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in ''Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did'', the words ''Alice'' ...
was added.
For named entity all phrases in the text were supposed to be marked as person, location, organization,
time or quantity.
The topics and text sources, which were processed, show a continuous move from military to civil themes, which mirrored
the change in business interest in
information extraction
Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...
taking place at the time.
Literature
* Ralph Grishman, Beth Sundheim:
Message Understanding Conference - 6: A Brief History.' In: ''Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING),'' I, Copenhagen, 1996, 466–471.
See also
*
DARPA TIPSTER Program
External links
MUC-7SAIC Information Extraction
MUC
{{Comp-sci-stub