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<Paper uid="X98-1001">
  <Title>The TIPSTER Text Program Overview</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> These TIPSTER Phase III Proceedings bring to a close a program that had significant impact on information technology. Since 1991, the TIPSTER Text program has fostered the advancement of state-of-the-art technologies for text handling through the efforts of researchers and developers in the U.S.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Government, industry and academia. The resulting capabilities are being deployed throughout the intelligence community to provide analysts with improved information processing tools.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The TIPSTER Program focused on research and development in three technology areas: Document detection, information extraction and text summarization. In addition, the development of multilingual or cross-lingual capabilities in each of these areas became a vital component of the program.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Metrics-based evaluations also constituted a critical program element. For example, the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), TIPSTER's metrics-based evaluation for document detection is now recognized as the premier source of ground-truth data upon which information retrieval developers can test their systems. The TREC collection is a sizable one and provides the foundation for developers to test scalability of retrieval systems. The Message Understanding Conference (MUC), the Multilingual Entity Task (MET) and the Summarization Analysis Conference (SUMAC) also are TIPSTER evaluation mechanisms to help the Government gauge technology progress in relevant areas.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> A summary of the accomplishments for the first two phases of the TIPSTER program is provided in the sections below. For more details, please see the proceedings for TIPSTER Phase I \[1\] and TIPSTER Phase II \[2\], respectively. The next article in this volume \[3\] provides the highlights from Phase III, the last phase of the TIPSTER program.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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