Breck Baldwin

EAGLE: An Extensible Architecture for General Linguistic Engineering

Over the course of two summer projects, we developed a general purpose natural language system which advances the state-of-the-art in several areas. The system contains demonstrated advancements in part-of-speech tagging, end-of-sentence detection, and coreference resolution. In addition, we believe that we have strong maximal noun phrase detection, and subject-verb-object recognition and a pat tern matching language well suited to a range of tasks. Other features of the system include modularity and interchangeability of components, rapid component integration and a debugging environment.

ACCOMMODATING CONTEXT CHANGE

Two independent mechanisms of context change have been discussed separately in the literature - context change by entity introduction and context change by event simulation. Here we discuss their integration. The effectiveness of the integration depends in part on a representation of events that captures peoples uncertainty about their outcome - in particular, peoples incomplete expectations about the changes effected by events. We propose such a representation and a process of accommodation that makes use of it, and discuss our initial implementation of these ideas.

Overview of the University of Pennsylvania's TIPSTER Project

CAMP software has been used in a variety of areas, but at the end of TIPSTER it finishes as it started--as a coreference annotation system. The coreference output has been used to participate in MUC-6 and MUC-7, served as the foundation for three types of summarization engines and been input to a cross-document coreference system for names and events. This document focuses on the most successful of these application, a query sensitive summarization system and a cross-document coreference system.