Second Call for Participation

Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2011)

http://tac.nist.gov/2011/

Track Evaluations: February - October 2011
Workshop: November 14-15, 2011

** Track Registration Deadline extended to: June 10, 2011 **

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


With support from:
U.S. Department of Defense

INTRODUCTION

The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of evaluations and 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 multiple tracks, each of which focuses on a particular subproblem of NLP. TAC tracks aim to improve end-user tasks, but also include diagnostic and component evaluations situated within the context of end-user tasks.

You are invited to participate in TAC 2011. 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. TAC 2011 has three tracks:

  1. Knowledge Base Population (KBP)
  2. Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE-7)
  3. Summarization

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.

TRACKS and TASKS

TAC 2011 has three tracks:

  1. Knowledge Base Population Track (KBP)
    Web page: http://nlp.cs.qc.cuny.edu/kbp/2011/   (archived here)
    Track Coordinators:
    The goal of the KBP track is to promote research in automated systems that discover information about named entities as found in a large corpus and incorporate this information into a given knowlege base (namely, a KB derived from Wikipedia). The KBP track comprises the following tasks:
  2. Recognizing Textual Entailment Track (RTE-7)
    Web page: http://tac.nist.gov/2011/RTE/
    Track Coordinators:
    The goal of the RTE Track is to develop systems that recognize when one piece of text entails another. RTE-7 pursues the direction of recognizing entailment in larger contexts -- a whole document or set of documents. RTE-7 comprises the following tasks:
  3. Summarization Track
    Web page: http://tac.nist.gov/2011/Summarization/
    Track Coordinators: Multiling Pilot Coordinators:
    The goal of the Summarization Track is to develop systems that produce coherent summaries of text. The Summarization track comprises the following tasks:

TRACK REGISTRATION

Organizations wishing to participate in any of the TAC 2011 tasks are invited to register online by June 10, 2011 at:

Track participants are advised to register and submit all required agreement forms as soon as possible in order to receive timely access to track resources. Participants should also make sure they are subscribed to the mailing lists for the tracks for which they are registered (see instructions on the individual track home pages). 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 2011 workshop will be held November 14-15, 2011, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. 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.

SCHEDULE

TAC 2011 Schedule
June 10Deadline for registration for track participation
July - SeptemberDeadlines for results submission (varies by track)
By September 25Release of individual evaluated results to participants
September 25Deadline for workshop presentation proposals
October 12Notification of acceptance of presentation proposals
October 25Deadline for system reports (workshop notebook version)
November 14-15TAC 2011 workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
February 2012Deadline for system reports (final proceedings version)

Last updated:
Comments to: [email protected]