Call for Problems for the 2017 ALTA Language Technology Programming Competition

[Diego Molla]

ALTA is seeking problems to use for the 2017 ALTA Language Technology Programming Competition. It will be the eighth competition in this series. As in the previous years, we welcome problems that can be run as a shared task. That is, all participants will attempt to solve the same task using common data and evaluated against a new test set that is common to all. The problems that we are seeking should have the following features:

* They are related to a language technology task.
* They should be easy to explain to undergraduate and Masters students with programming skills but without knowledge on language technology.
* The task should be of such a difficulty that would encourage the participants to attempt the competition, yet it is possible to discriminate among the best submissions and pick a winner. In other words, it should be very hard to get perfect results (so that it is difficult to have ties) but simple methods should achieve encouraging results.
* It should be possible to evaluate the results automatically (unless you are willing to evaluate the results yourself!)
* The training and test data can be distributed to the participants freely ("free" as for "freedom", and preferably with no or very small cost).
* The final test data should not be currently publicly available.

* And above all, the task should be fun!

The links to the previous competitions are:

2016: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2016/
2015: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2015/
2014: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2014/
2013: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2013/
2012: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2012/
2011: http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2011/
2010: http://comp.mq.edu.au/programming/index.htm

The closing date for submission of proposals is Monday 3 April 2017.

For any questions or to submit a proposal, please send an email to: share...@alta.asn.au

Diego