PRC Inc: Description Of The PAKTUS System Used For MUC-3 


The PRC Adaptive Knowledge-based Text Understanding System (PAKTUS) has been under development as an Independent Research and Development project at PRC since 1984. The objective is a generic system of tools, including a core English lexicon, grammar, and concept representations, for building natural language processing (NLP) systems for text understanding. Systems built with PAKTUS are intended to generate input to knowledge based systems ordata base systems. Input to the NLP system is typically derived from an existing electronic message stream, such as a news wire. PAKTUS supports the adaptation of the generic core to a variety of domains: JINTACCS messages, RAINFORM messages, news reports about a specific type of event, such as financial transfers or terrorist acts, etc., by acquiring sublanguage and domain-specific grammar, words, conceptual mappings, and discourse patterns. The long-term goal is a system that can support the processing of relatively long discourses in domains that are fairly broad with a high rate of success.

