Language Systems, Inc.: MUC-4 test results and analysis

LSI's overall natural language processing (NLP) objective is the development of a broad coverage, reusable system which is readily transportable to additional domains, applications, and sublanguages in English, as well as providing a foundation for our multilingual work. Our system, called DBG, for Data Base Generator, is comprised of a set of NLP components which have been developed, extended, and rebuilt over a period of some years. The core of the system is an innovative Principle-based parser, using ideas from [1], which we began developing in the course of MUC-3 to replace our previous chart parser. Our approach thus relies on the concept of powerful, robust parsing as the most crucial component in an NLP system. In applying our NLP system to text extraction, our ultimate objective is to develop a high quality text extraction system, where "high quality" is defined as scoring above 80% -- a number well beyond any current MUC scores.