Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2018)

INTRODUCTION

The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of shared tasks, evaluations and workshops organized to promote 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 2018. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the TAC tracks. 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. 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

TAC 2018 has four tracks:

• Entity Discovery and Linking (EDL)
  The goal of the EDL track is to extract mentions of pre-defined entity types from any language, and link (disambiguate and ground) them to the entities in an English knowledge base (KB).
  Track coordinator: Heng Ji (jih@rpi.edu) and Avirup Sil (avi@ibm.com)
  Home page: http://nlp.cs.rpi.edu/kbp/2018/
  Mailing list: tac-kbp@nist.gov
  


• Streaming Multimedia Knowledge Base Population (SM-KBP)
  The goal of the SM-KBP track is to develop and evaluate technologies that extract structured Knowledge Elements (KEs) from a variety of unstructured sources in order to generate explicit alternative interpretations of events, situations, and trends in noisy, conflicting, and potentially deceptive information environments.
  Track coordinator: Hoa Dang (hoa.dang@nist.gov)
  Home page: https://tac.nist.gov/2018/SM-KBP/
  Mailing list: sm-kbp@list.nist.gov
  


• Drug-Drug Interaction Extraction from Drug Labels (DDI)
  The purpose of the DDI track is to test various natural language processing (NLP) approaches for their information extraction (IE) performance on drug-drug interactions in Structured Product Labeling (SPL) documents.
  Track coordinator: Dina Demner-Fushman (ddemner@mail.nih.gov)
  Home page: https://bionlp.nlm.nih.gov/tac2018druginteractions/
  Mailing list: tac-adr@googlegroups.com
  


• Systematic Review Information Extraction (SRIE)
  The purpose of the SRIE track is to develop and evaluate Information Extraction (IE) approaches that can assist in the systematic reviews of environmental agents. This track will focus on IE of study design factors found in the Methods and Materials section of published studies of experimental animals exposed to environmental chemicals.
  Track coordinators: Charles Schmitt (charles.schmitt@nih.gov) and Mary Wolfe (wolfe@niehs.nih.gov)
  Home page: https://tac.nist.gov/2018/SRIE/
  Mailing list: tac-srie@list.nist.gov
  

TRACK REGISTRATION

Organizations wishing to participate in any of the TAC 2018 tracks are invited to register online by July 15, 2018 at:

https://tac.nist.gov/2018/registration.html

Participants are advised to register and submit all required agreement forms as soon as possible in order to receive timely access to track resources, including any sample and training data. Participants should also make sure they are subscribed to the mailing lists for the tracks for which they are registered. 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: tac-manager@nist.gov.

WORKSHOP

The TAC 2018 workshop will be held November 13-14, 2018, 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 2018 Schedule
July 15	Deadline for registration for track participation
August - October	Track evaluation windows (varies by track)
By mid October	Release of individual evaluated results to participants (most tracks)
October 15	Deadline for short system descriptions
October 15	Deadline for workshop presentation proposals
October 20	Notification of acceptance of presentation proposals
November 1	Deadline for system reports (workshop notebook version)
November 13-14	TAC 2018 workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
March 1, 2019	Deadline for system reports (final proceedings version)