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CoNLL-2016 Shared Task on Multilingual Shallow Discourse Parsing: Call for Participation
(August 11-12, 2016, Berlin, Germany)
(Apologies for cross-postings)
The 2016 CoNLL Shared Task will be a follow-on to the 2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing (SDP). This 2nd edition will be multilingual. In addition to English, which will be a repeat of the 2015 Shared Task, it will also include Chinese. Shallow Discourse Parsing is a task in which a participant system is given newswire texts as input and returns discourse relations in the form of a discourse connective (explicit or implicit) taking two arguments (which can be clauses, sentences, or multi-sentence segments). Specifically, a participant system needs to i) identify explicit discourse connectives (e.g., “because”, “however”, “and”) in a text, ii) predict the sense of the discourse relations (e.g., “Cause”, “Condition”, “Contrast”), both explicit and implicit, and iii) identify the spans of text that serve as the two arguments for each discourse relation. Understanding such discourse relations is an important step in understanding the discourse structure of a text and will potentially benefit a wide range of natural language applications.
Participating teams will be provided with common training data and auxiliary annotations and linguistic resources. Blind test data will be used to evaluate the outputs of the participating teams using a common scoring software and evaluation metric. Participating teams can choose to participate in the shared task for both languages or a single language, but the overall ranking will be based on results on all languages. Participating teams can also choose to submit the same system for all languages or different systems for different languages.
In order to receive further information about the shared task, participants should register their intent to participate by filling out the registration form at the shared task website (http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~clp/conll16st). The website is open for registration on January 15, 2016. Although the deadline for registration is not until February 29, 2016, we recommend participants to register as early as possible, in order not to miss any inportant information. Registered participants will be added to a discussion forum where further details of the shared task will be made available.
Questions about the shared task can be sent to conll16st [at] gmail.com. More information about the shared task is available at the shared task home page: http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~clp/conll16st.
Important dates:
January 15, 2016: registration begins, and release of training set and scorer.
February 29, 2016: Registration deadline.
April 20, 2016: Test set available.
April 27, 2016: Submission of participating systems.
May 1, 2016: System results due to participants.
May 8, 2016: Supplemental evaluations done.
May 15, 2016: Shared task system papers due.
May 25, 2016: Reviews due.
May 28, 2016: notification of acceptance.
June 4, 2016: camera-ready version of system papers due.
June 28, 2016: Shared Task overview paper ready.
July 1, 2016: Proceedings for the shared task ready.
Aug11-12, 2016. CoNLL conference (Berlin, Germany).
Organizers:
Nianwen Xue (chair), Brandeis University
Hwee Tou Ng, National University of Singapore
Sameer Pradhan, Boulder Learning
Bonnie Webber, University of Edinburgh
Attapol Rutherford, Brandeis University
Chuan Wang, Brandeis University
Hongmin Wang, National University of Singapore