These advantages are thought by many to offset some of the obvious disadvantages of this way of developing NLP theories--in particular, the fact that, given the current state of language processing technology, many hypotheses of interest cannot be tested yet (see below).
quantitative evaluation is now commonplace in areas of language engineering such as parsing, and quantitative evaluation techniques are being proposed for semantic interpretation as well, for example, at the Sixth and Seventh Message Understanding Conferences (MUC-6 and MUC-7) (Sundheim 1995;Chinchor 1997), which also included evaluations of systems on the so-called coreference task, a subtask of which is the resolution of definite descriptions.