MUC-4 evaluation metrics

The MUC-4 evaluation metrics measure the performance of the message understanding systems. This paper describes the scoring algorithms used to arrive at the metrics as well as the improvements that were made to the MUC-3 methods. MUC-4 evaluation metrics were stricter than those used in MUC-3. Given the differences in scoring between MUC-3 and MUC-4, the MUC-4 systems' scores represent a larger improvement over MUC-3 performance than the numbers themselves suggest.