University of Massachusetts: description of the CIRCUS system as used for MUC-3

ind this work was to extract a relatively abstract level of information from each sentence , using only a limited vocabulary that was hand-crafted to handle a restricted set of target concepts . We called this mode of language processing selective concept extraction, and the basic style of sentence analysis was a type of text skimming . This project provided us with an opportunity to give CIRCUS a workout and determine whether or not the basic design was working as expected . Although CIRCUS was subject to a number of limitations, the integration of syntax and semantic s appeared to work very nicely . We believed we had constructed a robust text skimmer that wa s semantically oriented but nevertheless able to use syntactic knowledge as needed . Projects associated with the connectionist aspect of CIRCUS took off at about this time and carried us in those directions for a while [3,4,5] . When an announcement for MUC-3 reached us in June of 1990, we felt that the MUC- 3 evaluation requir...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1991
• Where: MUC
• Authors: Wendy G. Lehnert, Claire Cardie, David Fisher, Ellen Riloff, Robert Williams
• Keywords: Circus, MUC 1991, Natural Language Processing, Processing Selective Concept, Selective Concept Extraction