Mitre

As with several other veteran MUC participants, MITRE's Alembic system has undergone a major transformation in the past two years. The genesis of this transformation occurred during a dinner conversation at the last MUC conference, MUC-5. At that time, several of us reluctantly admitted that our major impediment towards improved performance was reliance on then-standard linguistic models of syntax. We knew we would need an alternative to traditional linguistic grammars, even to the somewhat non-traditional categorial pseudo-parser we had in place at the time. The problem was, which alternative?