Message Understanding Conference

The Message Understanding Conferences ( MUC ) are a series of research competitions that were initiated and financed by the U.S. Agency DARPA to encourage the development of new and better methods of information extraction. The competitive nature - several competing research teams competed against each other - required the development of reliable standards for the evaluation, for example, developed for the MUC- 2 measurements recall and precision.

Topics and tasks

Only at the first meeting (MUC- 1), the participants were able to determine the output format for the extracted information itself. From the second session of the output format was specified, the systems of the participants were evaluated. For each topic area individual fields were set that had to be filled with information from the texts. Typical fields were eg the event, the actors, time and place of the event, the consequences, etc. The number of fields increased from meeting to meeting increasing.

With the sixth session (MUC- 6) came as an additional task to the identification of proper names (Named Entity Recognition). It all phrases should be selected in a text, the people, places, organizations, times and dimensions, respectively.

The topics and text types that were processed, show a continuous transition from military to civilian subjects, reflecting the increasing economic importance of information extraction.