text: The EDR has close ties to the named entity recognition ( NER ) and coreference resolution tasks , which have been the focus of several recent investigations ( Bikel et al. , 1997 ; Miller et al. , 1998 ; Borthwick , 1999 ; Mikheev et al. , 1999 ; Soon et al. , 2001 ; Ng and Cardie , 2002 ; Florian et al. , 2004 ) , and have been at the center of evaluations such as : MUC-6 , MUC-7 , and the CoNLL '02 and CoNLL '03 shared tasks .