SRI: description of the JV-FASTUS system used for MUC-5

SRI International developed an information extraction system called FASTUS, a permuted acronym standing for "Finite State Automata-based Text Understanding System. The choice of acronym is some-what misleading, however, because FASTUS is a system for information extraction, not text understanding. The former problem is much simpler and more tractable, characterized by a relatively straightforward specification of information to be extracted from the text, only a fraction of which is relevant to the extraction task, and with the author's underlying goals and nuances of meaning of little interest. In contrast, a text understanding task is to recover all of the information in a text, including that which is only implicit in what is actually written. All the richness of natural language becomes fair game, including metaphor, metonymy, discourse structure, and the recognition of the author's underlying intentions, and the full interplay between language and world knowledge becomes central to the task.