The Message Understanding Conferences (MUC) for computing and computer science, were initiated and financed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to encourage the development of new and better methods of information extraction.
The character of this competition, many concurrent research teams competing against one another—required the development of standards for evaluation, e.g. the adoption of metrics like precision and recall.
At the sixth conference (MUC-6) the task of recognition of named entities and coreference was added.
For named entity all phrases in the text were supposed to be marked as person, location, organization, time or quantity.
The topics and text sources, which were processed, show a continuous move from military to civil themes, which mirrored the change in business interest in information extraction taking place at the time.