TAC Track Proposals

The set of tracks that will be run in a given year of TAC depends on:

• appropriateness of task to TAC
• interests of participants
• needs of sponsors
• resource constraints

The TAC advisory committee selects the tracks based on track proposals. Criteria for selection of tracks include: a strong advocate who is willing to be the track coordinator (outside of NIST, track coordinator is a volunteer position); a large enough core of interested researchers to make the track viable; the availability of sufficient resources such as appropriate corpora and assessors with expertise in the area; and the fit with other tracks.

Proposals need to contain enough information for the advisory committee to assess the criteria above. Proposals should contain an explicit statement of the goals of the track (i.e., what is expected to be learned and/or what infrastructure would be created if the track were run). If manual assessment (or annotation) is required, the proposal needs to include where the assessing would occur (NIST or elsewhere?), any special qualifications the assessors would need (special domain expertise required?), as well as an estimate of the amount of time such assessing would require. Any special constraints on the document sets needed should also be noted. Finally, proposals must contain full contact details of the proposer. Track proposals should be sent as a postscript, PDF, or ASCII document to the TAC project manager (tac-manager@nist.gov).