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<Paper uid="M91-1004">
  <Title>MUC-3 LINGUISTIC PHENOMENA TEST EXPERIMEN T</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="31" end_page="31" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
METHOD
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Choice of Phenomeno n Apposition was chosen as the linguistic phenomenon because of its frequency of occurrence in messages and its criticalness for slot fills . An example of an appositive from the test corpus is &amp;quot;David Lecky, Director of the Columbus School .&amp;quot; There , were approximately 60 sentences in the test corpus containing one or more appositives which were critical to slot fills . Preliminary phenomena testing for thre e other phenomena occurring with varying frequencies suggested that a frequency o f 20 was adequate for testing purposes . With more than 60 instances of apposition , subdividing the set for testing well-defined subsets would still leave adequate numbers in the subdivisions . Also, there many more cases of appositives which affected slot fills, but could not be included in the testing because there were other source s for the slot fills elsewhere in the message. This high frequency of occurrence o f apposition in the messages suggests that it is a phenomenon which systems mus t handle in some way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Definition of Apposition The examples used from the test messages are all cases of noun phrases i n apposition .</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Among linguists, there is variation in the liberality with which the ter m apposition is used .</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> According to Quirk et -al [1], apposition meeting the followin g three conditions is full apposition : a. each of the appositives can be separately omitted without affecting th e acceptability of the sentence; b. each fulfills the same syntactic function in the resultant sentence ; and c. there is no difference between the original sentence and either of the resultant sentences in extralinguistic reference .</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> An example of full apposition is the following from test message TST2-MUC3 0004. null</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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