Evaluate the collective function of references cited together in a given text segment.
Classify their combined role into one of the following categories: 'method', 'background', or 'result'.

Text:…evaluation in NLP applications such as information retrieval (Doucet and Ahonen-Myka 2004; Xu et al. 2010; Acosta et al. 2011), word sense disambiguation (Finlayson and Kulkarni 2011), MT (Carpuat and Diab 2010; Pal et al. 2010) and ontology learning (Venkatsubramanyan and Perez-Carballo 2004).
Category: