Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
SRI International participated in the MUC-6 evaluation using the latest version of SRI's FASTUS system 1. The FASTUS system was originally developed for participation in the MUC-4 evaluation 3 in 1992, and the performance of FASTUS in MUC-4 helped demonstrate the viability of finite state technologies in constrained natural-language understanding tasks. The system has undergone significant revision since MUC-4, and it is safe to say that the current system does not share a single line of code with the original. The fundamental ideas behind FASTUS, however, are retained in the current system: an architecture consisting of cascaded finite state transducers, each providing an additional level of analysis of the input, together with merging of the final results.
Appelt et al. (Sun,) studied this question.