*SEM Shared Task 2013

Event Notification Type: 
Call for Proposals
Location: 
co-located with the NAACL HLT 2013
Sunday, 9 June 2013 to Friday, 14 June 2013
State: 
Georgia
Country: 
USA
City: 
Atlanta
Submission Deadline: 
Friday, 30 November 2012

*SEM Shared Task 2013

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The ACL special interest groups SIGLEX and SIGSEM invite proposals for
the *SEM Shared Task 2013.

*SEM is the joint conference on lexical and computational
semantics. The main goal of *SEM is to provide a stable forum for the
growing number of NLP researchers working on different aspects of
semantic processing, which has been scattered over a large array of
small workshops and conferences. The second edition of *SEM will be a
two-day conference co-located with the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics and Human Language
Technologies 2013 conference (NAACL HLT), which will take place in
Atlanta, USA, the week of June 9-14.

Every year *SEM includes a shared task, with the goal of attracting
the focus of the community. The ambition is to come up with a shared
task which is able to gather teams and researchers working on
different (lexical) semantic processing components.

*SEM 2012 included a shared task on Resolving the Scope and Focus of
Negation (http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/starsem/)

For *SEM 2013, proposals are invited for any shared
task related to lexical or computational semantics.
The same or similar shared tasks may be chosen for several years in a
row to focus the research attention of the community on a particular
semantic task.

The training and test data are provided by the organizers, which
allows participating systems to be evaluated and compared in a
systematic way. Descriptions of the participating systems and an
evaluation of their performance will be presented both at the
conference and in the proceedings.

Note that the SemEval task organizers are welcome to submit their
task to the *SEM shared task call as well. If accepted, their task will
be moved from SemEval to the shared task of *SEM.

Proposals should contain the following information:

- Names and affiliations of the members of the organizing committee
(including a designated contact person)
- Description of the shared task, including its relevance for the
study of computational and lexical semantics
- Description of the process for selecting, acquiring and preparing
the data for training and evaluation, including conditions of
availability
- Description of the procedure for evaluating the performance of
participating systems, including the availability of evaluation
software
- Any other relevant information

Proposals should be in PDF format, maximum 2 pages, and sent by e-mail
to the co-chairs:

Anna.Korhonen [at] cl.cam.ac.uk
malvina.nissim [at] unibo.it

Important Dates:

Shared Task Proposals due: 30 November 2013
Accept/Reject decision due: 10 December 2013

Any questions regarding the proposals can be sent to
Anna.Korhonen [at] cl.cam.ac.uk and malvina.nissim [at] unibo.it

For the accepted *SEM shared task, the expected timeline for 2013 is as follows:
- Dec 17: general announcement
- Jan 3: call for interest in participation
- Jan 3: task website (first version with general information,
task definition, examples and calendar)
- Jan 3: trial datasets (plus documentation and scorer)
- Jan 28: registration for the task (plus corpora licenses)
- Jan 30: training and development sets available
- Mar 8: test set available
- Mar 18: systems' outputs collected
In addition, the task organizers will be required to write a paper
describing their task and the participating systems.

Best regards,

Anna Korhonen and Malvina Nissim
*SEM Shared Task co-chairs