The Sequence PredIction ChallengE (SPiCe, http://spice.lif.univ-mrs.fr/) is on and will
last until the end of July! The goal of this competition is to guess the next symbol in a
sequence, given a set of complete sequences for training.
Data are coming from different fields, from Natural Language Processing to Bioinformatics,
including User Modelling, Software Testing, and even Sport Scooting! But we will not tell
you which one is coming from where, this would be too easy… There are also synthetically
generated data that have the same characteristics than the ones coming from the
real-world. The size of training samples varies from 20,000 to 1 million sequences.
To participate, you will find on the website of the competition, http://spice.lif.univ-mrs.fr/,
training data for 20 different problems. Once you have learned your model for a problem,
you have to submit a ranking of the 5 more probable next symbols for a given prefix.
You are then fed with another prefix. When you have provided rankings for all prefixes, a
score is computed and given to you as a feedback (more information on the website). To help
you get started, a python implementation of the API and a baseline based on spectral learning
are available on the competition website.
All participants will be encouraged to submit a short paper to the International Conference
in Grammatical Inference (ICGI, http://icgi2016.tudelft.nl/) that will be held in Delft,
The Netherlands, from 5th to 7th October 2016. The winners will also be invited to submit
a paper to the journal special issue that will follow. Cash prizes for top performers will
be announced shortly, stay tuned!
** Important Dates **
April 2016 : Beginning of the competition
End of July 2016 : The competition ends, the results are announced.
End of August 2016 : The short papers from the active participants are due.
5ht-7th October 2016 : A special session takes place at ICGI 2016.
Winter 2016-2017 : The winner(s) is (are) expected to submit a paper to the journal special
issue that will follow the ICGI 2016 conference
** Organization Committee **
Borja Balle, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Rémi Eyraud, Aix-Marseille Université, France
Franco Luque, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and CONICET, Argentina
Ariadna Quattoni, Xerox Research Center Europe, France
Sicco Verwer, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
** Scientific Committee **
Marc G. Bellemare, Google DeepMind, United Kingdom
Xavier Carreras, Xerox Research Center Europe, France
Alexander Clark, King's College London, United Kingdom
François Denis, Aix-Marseille Université, France
Colin de la Higuera, University of Nantes, France
Daniil Ryabko, INRIA Lille, France
Neil Walkinshaw, University of Leicester, United Kingdom
Menno van Zaanen, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
** Contact **
Please feel free to contact us at <spice2016.contact@gmail.com>