Call for Shared Task Participation
SemEval 2017 Task 6: #HashtagWars: Learning a Sense of Humor
This is a call for participation in a brand new task focused on computational approaches to humor, titled: #HashtagWars, Learning a Sense of Humor, to be held at this year’s SemEval (http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2017/task6/). The goal of the task is to encourage the development of novel systems for humor detection and understanding.
Task Overview
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Humor is an essential trait of human intelligence that has not yet been addressed extensively in the current AI research. Most work on humor detection to date has approached the problem as binary classification: humor or not humor. This representation ignores both the continuous nature of humor and the fact that humour is subjective. To address these concerns, we introduce the task #HashtagWars, Learning a Sense of Humor. The goal of this task is to encourage the development of methods that take into account the continuous nature of humor, on the one hand, and aim to characterize the sense of humour of a particular source, on the other hand.
Data & Evaluation
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This task uses a dataset based on humorous responses submitted to a Comedy Central TV show @Midnight (http://www.cc.com/shows/-midnight), which is a late-night "game-show" that presents a modern outlook on current events by focusing on content from social media. The show proposes a hashtag, and the show's viewers and contestants provide tweets that would have this hashtag. The show identifies top-10 funniest tweets and selects a single winning tweet. In order to represent the show’s sense of humour, we use this data to derive pairs of tweets based on the labels assigned by the show. Participants are going to be evaluated using a pairwise comparison task: given a pair of tweets, select the funnier tweet.
Current Status
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The training data has been released, comprising 11,985 tweets from 106 hashtags. The evaluation period will begin January 9, 2017, ending January 30, 2017. We also advise participants to join our google group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hashtag-wars-semeval) to stay current on important announcements and discussions.
Participation
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To register, please complete the following form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXnt7qeioCPyxu6dv9wrSDYaF04bRg...
Task Website:
http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2017/task6/
Discussion group / mailing list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21forum/hashtag-wars-semeval
Important Dates
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Mon 01 Aug 2016: Trial data ready
Mon 05 Sep 2016: Training data ready
Mon 09 Jan 2017: Evaluation start
Mon 30 Jan 2017: Evaluation end
Mon 06 Feb 2017: Results posted
Mon 27 Feb 2017: Paper submissions due
Mon 03 Apr 2017: Author notifications
Mon 17 Apr 2017: Camera ready submissions due
Task organizers:
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Anna Rumshisky, Peter Potash, Alexey Romanov
The Text Machine Lab
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Lowell