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  <Title>EVALUATION DRIVEN RESEARCH: The Foundation of the TIPSTER Text Program</Title>
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EVALUATION DRIVEN RESEARCH:
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    <Paragraph position="0"> The Foundation of the TIPSTER Text Program Dr. John D. Prange</Paragraph>
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Department of Defense
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      <Paragraph position="0"> jdprang @ afterlife.ncsc, mil INTRODUCTION: I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to be associated with the TIPSTER Text Program since its inception in 1989. Preliminary discussions among government researchers who were interested in establishing a major, new interagency text handling, processing, and exploitation program began in the Summer of that year and continued in earnest during the months that followed. Most of our frequent day-long planning meetings during the first year of our TIPSTER Program planning were held at DARPA headquarters in Arlington, VA and were chaired by the Program Manger of DARPA's Speech and Text R&amp;D efforts.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> There were clearly two different sets of experience and expertise present during these meetings.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2"> The DARPA Program Manager was a strong proponent and advocate of an Evaluation Driven Research Paradigm that he was following in the Speech component of his R&amp;D program. And even though this Program Manager had spent only slightly more than one year at DARPA, he clearly understood how DARPA established, funded and managed new R&amp;D Programs.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> The rest of us around the table had little or no previous exposure to either the details of an Evaluation Driven Research Paradigm or to the inner workings of DARPA programs. What we brought to the table were strong credentials and experience in artificial intelligence, natural language processing and computational linguistics. We also came with numerous challenging problems to be solved along with an understanding and appreciation of the text handling, processing, and exploitation needs of our individual agency's analysts and linguists.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4"> The TIPSTER Text Program was born out of the best combination of these two camps. Since its creation in 1989, TIPSTER has developed, grown and evolved into its current role as a major driving force within both the Information Retrieval and Information Extraction R&amp;D communities.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> TIPSTER has just completed its second, two-year Phase and is poised to begin Phase III, a three-year effort this coming October. Rather than running out of steam, TIPSTER has continued to pick up momentum and to broaden its area of interest and coverage as it proceeded through Phases I and II and now heads into Phase III.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="6"> Why has this happened? Looking back now from the perspective and vantage point of seven years of rich history, it is very clear to me that those of us who participated in these early, formative TIPSTER Text Program discussions collectively laid a very solid foundation. That foundation was built, &amp;quot;TIPSTER style&amp;quot;, out of an Evaluation Driven Paradigm, heavily borrowed from DARPA's Speech R&amp;D Program and it has continued to grow and evolve over the past seven years in a &amp;quot;TIPSTER unique&amp;quot; way.</Paragraph>
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