The Message Understanding Conferences (MUC) for
computing and
computer science, were initiated and financed by
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to encourage the development of new and better methods of
information extraction. 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
In pattern recognition, information retrieval, object detection and classification (machine learning), precision and recall are performance metrics that apply to data retrieved from a collection, corpus or sample space.
Precision (also called ...
.
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
Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre ...
and
coreference 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 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 The DARPA TIPSTER Text program was started in 1991 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is a 9-year multi-million dollar initiative, which sought to improve HLT for the handling of multilingual corpora that are utilized withi ...
External links
MUC-7SAIC Information Extraction
MUC
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