The MUC conferences
- How do the MUC conferences measure the performance of each text understanding system?
- What is recall?
- What is precision?
- What's an easy way to get 100% recall?
- What's a (relatively) easy way to approach 100% precision?
- True or False: Good performance on precision and recall at the MUCs was right around 50% for recall and 60% for precision.
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Dealing with unknown words
- The first thing TACITUS does is deal with _________ words.
- What tactic did TACITUS use to identify unknown words as Spanish surnames?
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Filtering out irrelevant sentences.
- How does TACITUS simplify the task of understanding whole messages, whose sentence length averages 25-30 words?
- How does TACITUS identify relevant sentences in a message?
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Template Activation
- In the text understanding system described by Jacobs and Rao, what activates templates?
- What happens when a template gets activated?
- What is a dynamic lexicon in the sense used by Jacob and Rao? Why not just put all your lexical knowledge in the core lexicon?
- What is an example of a word which might have a domain-specific usage, which would best be defined as part of the dynamic lexicon rather than the core lexicon?
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Preprocessing
- Text understanding techniques often use a preprocessing phase which uses _______________ techniques to _____________ the sentence into phrases.
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Pre-processing
- What is the purpose of the pre-processing phase in automated text understanding?
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Parsing
- What is the output of the parsing module of TACITUS?
- What is the main disadvantage of bottom-up parsing?
- What is the main advantage of bottom-up parsing?
- How does TACITUS prune the parsing space?
- How does TACITUS deal with very long sentences?
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Analysis
- In Jacobs and Rao's text understanding system, what does the parser provide to the relation-driven control module? What does it get back from it?
- In Jacobs and Rao's text understanding system, semantic interpretation is done largely by _______ing the _____________ for the events and sub-events which pertain to active schema templates.
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Semantic interpretation
- Say the parser produces these propositions: 'there exists x, and x is a train, and there exists y, and y is dynamite, and x hit y and x derailed'. What is the job of the semantic interpreter in TACITUS?
- What kind of knowledge does the semantic interpreter refer to in order to fill in the semantic gaps in text?
- When the semantic interpreter has two possible interpretations, how does it choose between them?
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Relation-driven control
- In the illustration, what does the HEAD indicate?
- In the illustration, what does the ROLE indicate?
- In the illustration, what does the FILLER indicate?
- In the illustration what kind of question is being asked along the edge marked 'A'?
- In the illustration what kind of question is being asked along the edge marked 'B'?
- In the illustration what kind of question is being asked along the edge marked 'C'?
- Where does the relation-driven control module get inputs that the illustration describes?
- What does the relation-driven control module do with the inputs that the illustration describes?
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Machine Understanding and Data Extraction
- The input to a data extraction program is a stream of text, possibly from newswires. In the case of the data extraction exemplfied in the MUC conferences, what is the output?
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