University of Massachusetts: Description of the CIRCUS System as Used for MUC-3

In 1988 Professor Wendy Lehnert completed the initial implementation of a semantically-oriented sentence analyzer named CIRCUS [1]. The original design for CIRCUS was motivated by two basic research interests: (1) we wanted to increase the level of syntactic sophistication associated with semantically-oriented parsers, and (2) we wanted to integrate traditional symbolic techniques in natural language processing with connectionist techniques in an effort to exploit the complementary strengths of these two computational paradigms.