University of Pennsylvania

Breck Baldwin and Jeff Reynar informally began the University of Pennsylvania's MUC-6 coreference effort in January of 1995. For the first few months, tools were built and the system was extended at weekly 'hack sessions.' As more people began attending these meetings and contributing to the project, it grew to include eight graduate students. While the effort was still informal, Mark Wasson, from Lexis-Nexis, became an advisor to the project. In July, the students proposed to the faculty that we formally participate in the coreference task. By that time, we had developed some of the system's infrastructure and had implemented a simplistic coreference resolution system which resolved proper nouns by means of string matching. After much convincing, the faculty agreed at the end of July that we could formally participate in MUC-6. We then began an intensive effort with full-time participation from Baldwin and Reynar, and part-time efforts from the other authors. In August we were given permission from Yael Ravin of IBM's Information Retrieval group to use the IBM Name Extraction Module 3. We were also given access to a large acronym dictionary which Peter Flynn maintains for a world wide web site in Iceland (http://curia.ucc.ie/info/net/acronyms/acro.html).