| { |
| "paper_id": "M92-1016", |
| "header": { |
| "generated_with": "S2ORC 1.0.0", |
| "date_generated": "2023-01-19T03:13:01.136412Z" |
| }, |
| "title": "PARAMAX SYSTEMS CORPORATION : MUC-4 TEST RESULTS AND ANALYSI S", |
| "authors": [ |
| { |
| "first": "Carl", |
| "middle": [], |
| "last": "Weir", |
| "suffix": "", |
| "affiliation": { |
| "laboratory": "", |
| "institution": "Paramax Systems Corporation Valley Forge Lab s Paoli", |
| "location": { |
| "country": "Pennsylvani" |
| } |
| }, |
| "email": "weir@prc.unisys.com" |
| }, |
| { |
| "first": "Barry", |
| "middle": [], |
| "last": "Silk", |
| "suffix": "", |
| "affiliation": { |
| "laboratory": "", |
| "institution": "Paramax Systems Corporation Valley Forge Lab s Paoli", |
| "location": { |
| "country": "Pennsylvani" |
| } |
| }, |
| "email": "" |
| } |
| ], |
| "year": "", |
| "venue": null, |
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| "abstract": "", |
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| "paper_id": "M92-1016", |
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| "abstract": [], |
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| "text": "The data extraction system submitted by Paramax for evaluation in MUC-4 is a new implementatio n written in CLIPS, a forward-chaining system developed and maintained by NAS A 's Johnson Space Center [1] . Using CLIPS as a forward-chaining engine is desirable because it runs on a wide range of machine s (including Sun Sparc stations, Apple Mac IIs, and PCs), it is available at little or no cost from th e government, it is fast, and it comes with good documentation and support services.", |
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| "start": 199, |
| "end": 202, |
| "text": "[1]", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTIO N", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "The Paramax MUC-4 development team consisted of one Paramax staff member and one governmen t employee on sabbatical at Paramax . The data extraction module was designed and implemented in les s than two months, using less than four person-months of labor . Developing inference rules for the system did not require any linguistic expertise or any detailed knowledge of CLIPS-neither of the developer s had any prior experience using CLIPS . All that was required was knowledge of the domain and the dat a extraction task to be performed .", |
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| "section": "INTRODUCTIO N", |
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| "text": "The Paramax MUC-4 system's ALL TEMPLATES score summaries for the TST3 and TST4 test set s are listed below . The Paramax system generated more spurious responses in each of the two tests than any other system : the average number of TST3 spurious responses for all systems participating in MUC-4 was 883 and the average number of TST4 spurious responses was 867 ; the Paramax system generated 2207 and 2240 spurious responses, respectively. INC ICR IPA SPU MIS NON REC PRE OV G TST3 1693 3264 TST4 1253 3148 607 225 22 5 529 184 195 14 154 2207 636 2224 2 117 2240 345 2050 42 22 6 8 50 20 71 Since the Paramax MUC-4 implementation is substantially different from the Paramax MUC-3 submission, the two systems are difficult to compare . 2 The rules developed for the MUC-4 system were initiall y based on rules developed for the MUC-3 system, but the MUC-3 and MUC-4 rule formalisms are significantly different in structure and functionality . In Figure 1 , the TST2 scores for the Paramax MUC-3 system and the TST3 progress scores for the MUC-4 system are listed .3", |
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| "start": 756, |
| "end": 757, |
| "text": "2", |
| "ref_id": "BIBREF1" |
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| "start": 441, |
| "end": 611, |
| "text": "INC ICR IPA SPU MIS NON REC PRE OV G TST3 1693 3264 TST4 1253 3148 607 225 22 5 529 184 195 14 154 2207 636 2224 2 117 2240 345 2050 42 22 6 8 50 20 71", |
| "ref_id": null |
| }, |
| { |
| "start": 966, |
| "end": 974, |
| "text": "Figure 1", |
| "ref_id": "FIGREF0" |
| } |
| ], |
| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "TEST RESULT S", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
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| "text": "An examination of the scores in Figure 1 indicates that improvements in recall between MUC-3 an d MUC-4 have generally resulted in degraded precision scores . However, the P&R F scores for the MUC-3", |
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| "ref_spans": [ |
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| "start": 32, |
| "end": 40, |
| "text": "Figure 1", |
| "ref_id": "FIGREF0" |
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| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "TEST POS ACT COR PAR", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "1 Barry Silk is a U .S . government employee on sabbatical at Paramax .", |
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| "section": "TEST POS ACT COR PAR", |
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| "text": "3 NRaD (formerly NOSC) rescored the MUC-3 TST2 scores of veteran sites in order to calculate F measures . The TST2 scores listed in Figure 1 are these rescored results, not the ones that appear in the MUC-3 proceedings [21 . The MUC-4 TST3 progress scores differ slightly from the official MUC-4 TST3 scores ; the differences result from minor adjustments which make the comparision with MUC-3 TST2 scores more meaningful . TST2 and MUC-4 TST3 evaluations indicate an improvement of 1 .34 in overall performance . F measure s are determined using the following formula :", |
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| "ref_spans": [ |
| { |
| "start": 132, |
| "end": 140, |
| "text": "Figure 1", |
| "ref_id": "FIGREF0" |
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| ], |
| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "The Paramax MUC-3 system was submitted by the Unisys Center for Advanced Informaton Technology (CAIT), whic h has since been renamed Paramax Valley Forge Labs R&D .", |
| "sec_num": "2" |
| }, |
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| "text": "F -(p'; 1 .0) xPxR where P is precision, R is recall, and Q is the relative importance given to recal l", |
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| "start": 8, |
| "end": 13, |
| "text": "1 .0)", |
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| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "The Paramax MUC-3 system was submitted by the Unisys Center for Advanced Informaton Technology (CAIT), whic h has since been renamed Paramax Valley Forge Labs R&D .", |
| "sec_num": "2" |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "p xP} R over precision . 4", |
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| "eq_spans": [], |
| "section": "The Paramax MUC-3 system was submitted by the Unisys Center for Advanced Informaton Technology (CAIT), whic h has since been renamed Paramax Valley Forge Labs R&D .", |
| "sec_num": "2" |
| }, |
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| "text": "No analyses of statistical significance were performed among MUC-3 TST2 and MUC-4 TST3 performances . However, analyses of statistical significance were performed among F scores across system s participating in MUC-4 . The results of these analyses indicate that for the P&R F measure (in whic h precision and recall are given equal weight), there was no significant difference in performance between th e Paramax system and the system submitted by SRA . Similarly, on the 2P&R F measure (in which precisio n is given more weight), there was no significant difference in performance between the Paramax system an d the systems submitted for evaluation by McDonnell-Douglas (MDC) and New Mexico-Brandeis (NM-BR) . Finally, on the P&2R F measure (in which recall is given more weight), there was no significant differenc e in performance between the Paramax system and the system submitted by BBN . Appendix G provide s additional information on F scores and how the analyses of statistical significance were performed .", |
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| "section": "The Paramax MUC-3 system was submitted by the Unisys Center for Advanced Informaton Technology (CAIT), whic h has since been renamed Paramax Valley Forge Labs R&D .", |
| "sec_num": "2" |
| }, |
| { |
| "text": "The Paramax MUC-4 implementation satisfied the key goal of its developers : a fast rule development cycle . The Paramax MUC-3 system was implemented using a forward-chaining engine called Pfc, whic h is written in Prolog . Although the Pfc rule formalism has a number of interesting properties, includin g in particular a mechanism for easily escaping to Prolog in order to use Prolog's built-in factbase and t o reason in a backward-chaining fashion, the system as a whole was inefficient . Processing a standard test set of 100 messages using the MUC-3 implementation required 40 hours of processing time running on three separate Sun workstations. In contrast, the Paramax MUC-4 system implemented in CLIPS ca n process 100 messages in just 31. hours on one Sun workstation . This dramatic improvement in the rule development cycle made it possible to achieve a respectable level of performance in a small amount of time .", |
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| "section": "ANALYSIS", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "The mid-range performance of the Paramax MUC-4 system could have been significantly improved i f additional staffing had been available to better engineer the implementation .' After the MUC-4 test, i t was determined that a bug existed in the preprocessing code for recognizing sentence boundaries-sentenc e endings terminated by double quotes were not recognized . Since sentence boundaries play a very important role in determining the relative likelihood of possible slot values, this problem had a significant impact on the accuracy of the system's slot value preferencing heuristics . The problem could have been easily resolved if enough staffing had been available to more carefully examine system output during trainin g runs. Bugs in the forward-chaining rule base were also discovered after the MUC-4 test that would hav e been easy to correct and that had a dramatic cumulative impact on performance . Examples of such bug s are given in the Paramax MUC-4 system summary.", |
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| "section": "ANALYSIS", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "The Paramax system 's high rate of spurious responses was caused by a poor performance in establishin g coreference among event descriptions . This poor performance was caused in large part by a lack o f time/staffing to develop routine heuristics for merging similar templates . For example, in some cases th e Paramax system would generate two identical templates for the same message . In other cases, the same target would arise in two different templates of the same type for the same message (ie, the same buildin g would be bombed, the same individual would be killed, and so forth) . Improving the set of heuristics use d to establish object coreference will be a top priority for the Paramax team in MUC-5 . These improvements should result in a lower rate of spurious responses . 4 1n the case of P&R F scores, for which recall and precision are given equal weight, ,0 = 1 .0.", |
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| "section": "ANALYSIS", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| { |
| "text": "'No formal mechanism exists for determining the level of effort dedicated to the development of MUC-4 systems, and the informal estimates offered by the participating research groups are surely inaccurate . We estimate that implementations which performed better than the Paramax system generally involved double the staffing level-most such systems wer e developed with government support, which is not the case for the Paramax system .", |
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| "section": "ANALYSIS", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "The Paramax MUC-4 system takes about 32 hours to process 100 messages on a Sparc2 with 32MB o f memory and a normal CPU load (ie, with a text editor or two in use) . The CLIPS-based data extraction component's average elapsed processing time per text in the MUC-4 TST3 data set is 1 minute, 47 seconds . This processing speed permits a fast rule development cycle, which is critical in building knowledge-base d systems .", |
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| "section": "CONCLUDING REMARK S", |
| "sec_num": null |
| }, |
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| "text": "A failure to insure a rapid rule development cycle is a common mistake among research groups that ar e not accustomed to building large-scale text processing systems . This mistake was made by a number o f research groups in MUC-3, and the Paramax team and other research groups, most notably SRI, rectifie d this mistake in MUC-4 . The MUC-4 development strategies of Paramax and SRI were roughly similar : a rapid rule development cycle was insured by stripping away inefficient linguistic analysis techniques . Th e SRI MUC-4 system performed significantly better than the Paramax submission, but this is very likely a result of greater staffing resources than the consequence of some fundamental difference in approach .", |
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| "section": "CONCLUDING REMARK S", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "For both the Paramax and SRI research teams, the decision to eliminate linguistic analysis technique s was more a recognition of the primary importance of satisfying the requirements of knowledge-based systems than it was a rejection of linguistic analysis as a useful methodology in text processing . Linguisti c analysis is still clearly necessary for achieving finer-grained data extraction capabilities, but additional research must be performed to improve the efficiency and robustness of the techniques . Meanwhile, the dat a extraction capabilities of systems with only rudimentary linguistic analysis techniques are capable of generating data bases with sufficient detail to cause researchers to begin worrying about system developmen t issues beyond the data extraction process itself. Paramount among these issues is the need to perfor m object coreference on the database level-in other words, to recognize that multiple database records ar e describing the same object . Until object cofererence on the data base level becomes a manageable problem , it will be difficult to use the data bases that are now being extracted .", |
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| "section": "CONCLUDING REMARK S", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "The decision on the part of the Paramax team to build a completely new text processing implementatio n for MUC-4 was a difficult one to make . Although it was clearly necessary to achieve a fast rule developmen t cycle, it was also clear that building a new implementation in only a couple of months with limited staffin g was a high risk venture . But in retrospect, the Paramax team is confident that the right decision wa s made ; system development requirements were prioritized and the need for a rapid rule development cycl e came out on top .", |
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| "section": "CONCLUDING REMARK S", |
| "sec_num": null |
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| "text": "What is truly surprising is that the Paramax MUC-4 system did as well as it did, given the level o f effort that went into developing it . CLIPS has proven to be an excellent choice for building rule-base d text analysis systems : it is an extremely fast forward-chaining engine, and it is easily integrated wit h other analysis components . Several CLIPS rule modules developed for the MUC-4 system can be reused , particularly the rules used to recognize proper names . Since the MUC-4 test, the Paramax team ha s implemented a specialized proper name database containing over 9,000 entries in C in order to reduce the size of the CLIPS fact base . This strategy should further improve the modularity and reasoning efficienc y of the text processing system .", |
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| "BIBREF1": { |
| "ref_id": "b1", |
| "title": "Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office . Third Message Understanding Conference (MUC-3)", |
| "authors": [], |
| "year": 1991, |
| "venue": "DARPA", |
| "volume": "", |
| "issue": "", |
| "pages": "", |
| "other_ids": {}, |
| "num": null, |
| "urls": [], |
| "raw_text": "DARPA, Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office . Third Message Understanding Confer- ence (MUC-3) . Morgan Kaufmann, May 1991 .", |
| "links": null |
| } |
| }, |
| "ref_entries": { |
| "FIGREF0": { |
| "text": "MUC-3 and MUC-4 Performance Compariso n", |
| "type_str": "figure", |
| "uris": null, |
| "num": null |
| } |
| } |
| } |
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