TAC 2009: Call for Participation

Text Analysis Conference (TAC)
http://tac.nist.gov/

Track Evaluations: February - October 2009
Workshop: November 16-17, 2009

Conducted by:
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

INTRODUCTION

The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of evaluation workshops organized to encourage research in Natural Language Processing and related applications, by providing a large test collection, common evaluation procedures, and a forum for organizations to share their results. TAC comprises sets of tasks known as "tracks," each of which focuses on a particular subproblem of NLP. TAC tracks focus on end-user tasks, but also include component evaluations situated within the context of end-user tasks. In the first Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2008), 65 teams participated in one or more tracks, representing 20 different countries and six continents.

You are invited to participate in TAC 2009. NIST will provide test data for each track, and track participants will run their NLP systems on the data and return their results to NIST for evaluation. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the tracks. The annual conference culminates in a November workshop at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. All results submitted to NIST are archived on the TAC web site, and all evaluations of submitted results are included in the conference proceedings. Dissemination of TAC work and results other than in the conference proceedings is welcomed, but the conditions of participation specifically preclude any advertising claims based on TAC results.

TRACK DESCRIPTION

TAC 2009 has three tracks. A new Knowledge Base Population track (KBP) joins the Recognizing Textual Entailment track (RTE-5) and the Summarization track, which are both returning from TAC 2008.

What's NEW in 2009:

The exact definition of the tasks to be performed in each TAC 2009 track is formulated and discussed on the track mailing list. To be added to a track mailing list, follow the instructions given in the track web page for contacting the mailing list. For questions about the track, send mail to the track coordinator (or post the question to the track mailing list once you join).

TRACK REGISTRATION

Organizations wishing to participate in any of the TAC 2009 tracks are invited to register online by May 31, 2009. Registration for a track does not commit you to participating in the track, but is helpful to know for planning. Late registration will be permitted only if resources allow. Any questions about conference participation may be sent to the TAC project manager: [email protected].

WORKSHOP

The TAC 2009 workshop will be held November 16-17, 2009, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, and is co-located with the meeting of the Eighteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2009). The TAC workshop is a forum both for presentation of results (including failure analyses and system comparisons), and for more lengthy system presentations describing techniques used, experiments run on the data, and other issues of interest to researchers in NLP. Track participants who want to give a presentation during the workshop will submit a 500-word abstract in September describing the experiments they performed. As there is a limited amount of time for oral presentations, the TAC advisory committee will use the abstracts to determine which participants are asked to speak and which will present in a poster session.

SCHEDULE

Preliminary Schedule
Beginning March 3Submit signed User Agreements to NIST
May 31Deadline for track registration
July - early SeptemberDeadlines for results submission
September 25Deadline for workshop presentation proposals
September 25Deadline for proposals for future tracks/tasks
By early OctoberRelease of individual evaluated results to participants
mid OctoberDeadline for participants' notebook papers
November 16-17 TAC 2009 workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
February 1, 2010Deadline for participants' final proceedings papers

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

Last updated:
Comments to: [email protected]