  Certain applications require that the output of an information extraction
system be probabilistic, so that a downstream system can reliably fuse the
output with possibly contradictory information from other sources. In this
paper we consider the problem of assigning a probability distribution to
alternative sets of coreference relationships among entity descriptions. We
present the results of initial experiments with several approaches to
estimating such distributions in an application using SRI's FASTUS information
extraction system.
