Overview of the third message understanding evaluation and conference

The Naval Ocean Systems Center (NOSC) has conducted the third in a series o f evaluations of English text analysis systems . These evaluations are intended to advance our understanding of the merits of current text analysis techniques, a s applied to the performance of a realistic information extraction task. The latest one is also intended to provide insight into information retrieval technolog y (document retrieval and categorization) used instead of or in concert wit h language understanding technology . The inputs to the analysis/extraction proces s consist of naturally-occurring texts that were obtained in the form of electroni c messages . The outputs of the process are a set of templates or semantic frame s resembling the contents of a partially formatted database .