UMass/Hughes: Description of the CIRCUS System Used for MUC-51

The primary goal of our effort is the development of robust and portable language processing capabilities for information extraction applications. The system under evaluation here is based on language processing components that have demonstrated strong performance capabilities in previous evaluations [Lehnert et al. 1992a]. Having demonstrated the general viability of these techniques, we are now concentrating on the practicality of our technology by creating trainable system components to replace hand-coded data and manually-engineered software.