Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2023)

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 2023. 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 workshop to report on evaluation results.

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 2023 has three tracks:

• Plain Language Adaptation of Biomedical Abstracts (PLABA)
  The goal of the PLABA track is to adapt biomedical abstracts for the general public using plain language.
  Track coordinators: Brian Ondov (brian.ondov@nih.gov) and Dina Demner-Fushman (ddemner@mail.nih.gov)
  Home page: https://bionlp.nlm.nih.gov/plaba2023/
  Group / mailing list: plaba2023@googlegroups.com
  


• Recognizing Ultra Fine-grained EntitieS (RUFES)
  The goal of the KBP RUFES track is to extract and corefer mentions of fine-grained entity types in text.
  Track coordinator: Hoa Dang (hoa.dang@nist.gov) and Shudong Huang (shudong.huang@nist.gov)
  Home page: https://tac.nist.gov/2023/KBP/RUFES/
  Group / mailing list: tac-kbp@list.nist.gov
  


• Claim Relation Understanding and Extraction (CRUX)
  The goal of the CRUX track is to develop and evaluate technologies that extract structured information from a variety of unstructured multilingual multimodal sources in order to extract explicit alternative claims about situations and events in noisy, conflicting, and potentially deceptive information environments.
  Track coordinator Yi Fung (yifung2@illinois.edu)
  Home page: https://tac.nist.gov/2023/KBP/CRUX/
  Group / mailing list: tac-crux2023@googlegroups.com
  

TRACK REGISTRATION

Organizations wishing to participate in any of the TAC 2023 tracks are invited to register online by October 15, 2023 at:

https://tac.nist.gov/2023/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 2023 workshop will be co-located with the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) and TRECVID on November 13, 2023, 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 2023 Schedule
April - October 2023	Track evaluation windows (varies by track)
October 15, 2023	Deadline for registration for TAC 2023 track participation
By mid October 2023	Release of individual evaluated results to participants (most tracks)
October 15, 2023	Deadline for short system descriptions (varies by track)
October 15, 2023	Deadline for workshop presentation proposals (varies by track)
October 20, 2023	Notification of acceptance of presentation proposals (varies by track)
November 1, 2023	Deadline for system reports (workshop notebook version)
November 13, 2023	TAC 2023 workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA (co-located with TREC/TRECVID 2023)
March 15, 2024	Deadline for system reports (final proceedings version)