Introduction to the CoNLL-2000 Shared Task: Chunking
  We describe the CoNLL-2000 shared task: dividing text into syntactically related non-overlapping groups of words, so-called text chunking. We give background information on the data sets, present a general overview of the systems that have taken part in the shared task and briefly discuss their performance. 
Erik F. Tjong Kim Sang and Sabine Buchholz