YERCEPTIONS OF A GLOBAL CRISIS have been rampant for over a decade. Third world nations fear their development prospects are being undermined by a series of devastating external shocks. Unprecedentedly high levels of foreign debt service, coupled with climbing interest rates and falling export revenues, have forced many developing countries to cut imports, restrict public-sector spending, curta...

Organizations are struggling with evaluating technology options, many related to complex technologies like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Real options theory is one way for organizations to evaluate technology options. However, real options theory for complex technologies currently lacks organization contextualization. Path dependency theory addresses why sub-optimal technologies d...

Statistical Language Understanding Using Frame Semantics

This is a very young project, operational for only a few months . The focus of the effort is dataextraction, the identification of instances of data-classes in "commercial" text -e .g., newspapers, technical reports, business correspondence, intelligence briefs . Instances of data-classes in text are phrases which identify factual content, such as names of people or organizations, products, fin...

Time-offset interaction is a new technology that enables conversational interaction with a person who is not present, using pre-recorded video statements. Statements were recorded by Pinchas Gutter, a Holocaust survivor, talking about his personal experiences before, during and after the Holocaust. Participants interacted with the statements through a “Wizard of Oz” system, where live operators...

In this paper we revisit the task of quantitative evaluation of coreference resolution systems. We review the most commonly used metrics (MUC, B, CEAF and BLANC) on the basis of their evaluation of coreference resolution in five texts from the OntoNotes corpus. We examine both the correlation between the metrics and the degree to which our human judgement of coreference resolution agrees with t...

The third thread is the sponsorship of the international Message Understanding Conferences (MUC's) and Text Retrieval Conferences (TREC's). These conferences, which evaluated the state of the art and promoted text-processing R&D outside of the TIPSTER Text contracts, were organized by NRaD and NIST. MUC-1 and MUC-2 preceded and set the stage for TIPSTER, before the sponsorship of these conferen...