Reminder: Call for Problems for the 2021 ALTA Shared Task - Deadline 4 June 2021

[Diego Molla]

This is a reminder that the deadline for submission of proposals is Friday 4 June 2021.

ALTA is seeking problems to use for the eleventh ALTA Shared Task. The ALTA shared tasks are targeted at university students with programming experience.

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 it 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 using an evaluation platform such as Kaggle in Class (https://inclass.kaggle.com)
* 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:

2020: Assess human behaviour http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2020/

2019: Sarcasm target identification http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2019/

2018: Classifying patent applications, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2018/

2017: Correcting OCR errors, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2017/
2016: Cross-KB Correference, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2016/
2015: Identifying French cognates in English text, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2015/
2014: Identifying expressions of locations in tweets, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2014/
2013: Case and punctuation restoration, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2013/
2012: PIBOSO sentence classification, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2012/
2011: Automatic Grading of Evidence, http://www.alta.asn.au/events/sharedtask2011/
2010: Multilingual language identification, http://comp.mq.edu.au/programming/index.htm

The closing date for submission of proposals is Friday 4 June 2021.

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

Diego