Description of the UNL/USL system used for MUC-3

The MUC-3 task consists of generating a database of filled templates with respect to messages that belong to a general topical domain, in particular, for the current phase, the message collection belongs to the domain of terrorist activities.

Abstract

The MUC-3 task consists of generating a database of filled templates with respect to messages that belong to a general topical domain. In particular, for the current phase, the message collection belongs to the domain of terrorist activities. On the one hand, a decision as to the relevance of a message to a specified class of terrorist events should be made. If relevant, a predefined set of facts are to be extracted and placed as fills for appropriate slots of the template(s) created for this message. If not relevant, a template having a '*' as the fill in all but one slot, is created (see Appendix A for details). Some aspects of the MUC-3 task are amenable to be solved by techniques typically employed in information retrieval (IR). These techniques are especially designed to be applicable to any domain. In contrast, there are other aspects of the problem that may require a great deal of language understanding, thus needing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. For the most part, NLP techniques may be considered domain dependent.