Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2012)
http://www.nist.gov/tac/2012/KBP/
Task Evaluations: February - October 2012
Workshop: November 5-6, 2012

Conducted by: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
With support from: U.S. Department of Defense

INTRODUCTION

The Text Analysis Conference (TAC) is a series of 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. NIST provides test data for each task, and participants run their NLP systems on the data and return their results to NIST for evaluation. The conference culminates in a November workshop at NIST in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
You are invited to participate in TAC 2012. Organizations may choose to participate in any or all of the TAC 2012 tasks. 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.

TASKS
 
TAC KBP 2012 Overview

TAC 2012 focuses on Knowledge Base Population (KBP). The goal of Knowledge Base Population is to promote research in automated systems that discover information about named entities as found in a large corpus and incorporate this information into a knowledge base. TAC 2012 fields tasks in three areas, all aimed at improving the ability to automatically populate knowledge bases from text:

Entity-Linking: Given a name (of a Person, Organization, or Geopolitical Entity) and a document containing that name, determine the KB node for the named entity, adding a new node for the entity if it is not already in the KB. The reference KB is derived from English Wikipedia, while source documents come from a variety of languages, including English, Chinese, and Spanish.
Slot-Filling: Given a named entity and a pre-defined set of attributes ("slots") for the entity type, augment a KB node for that entity by extracting all new learnable slot values for the entity as found in a large corpus of documents. The reference KB is derived from English Wikipedia, while source documents come from English and Spanish. A diagnostic task, Slot Filler Validation, will be to determine whether a candidate filler in a document is a correct slot-filler for a given entity.
Cold Start Knowledge Base Population: Given a KB schema with an empty knowledge base, build the KB from scratch by mining a large text collection.
To promote research in populating probabilistic knowledge bases, systems may augment each assertion they make with a confidence score.

 KBP track coordinators:
  • James  Mayfield  (james.mayfield@jhuapl.edu)
  • Javier Artiles  ( javier.artiles@mail.rakuten.com )
 
  REGISTRATION
Organizations wishing to participate in any of the TAC 2012 tasks are invited to register online by June 10, 2012. Participants are advised to register and submit all required agreement forms as soon as possible in order to receive timely access to evaluation resources, including any sample and training data. Registration for a task does not commit you to participating in the task, 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.
◦ Track registration form:
  http://www.nist.gov/tac/2012/KBP/track-app.html

WORKSHOP
The TAC 2012 workshop will be held November 5-6, 2012, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA. The 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 Information Extraction and NLP. KBP task participants who wish to give a presentation during the workshop will submit a short abstract in September describing the experiments they performed. As there is a limited amount of time for oral presentations, the abstracts will be used to determine which participants are asked to speak and which will present in a poster session.

SCHEDULE
TAC 2012 Schedule (Preliminary)
June 10 Deadline for registration for track participation
July - early September Deadlines for results submission (varies by task)
September 25 Deadline for workshop presentation proposals
By late September Release of individual evaluated results to participants
October 3 Notification of acceptance of presentation proposals
October 17 Deadline for system reports (workshop notebook version)
November 5-6 TAC 2012 workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
February 5, 2013 Deadline for system reports (final proceedings version)
 
  ORGANIZERS
Javier Artiles (Coordinator, Rakuten Institute of Technology, javier.artiles@mail.rakuten.com)
James Mayfield (Coordinator, Johns Hopkins University, james.mayfield@jhuapl.edu)
Hoa Trang Dang (NIST, hoa.dang@nist.gov)
Joe Ellis (LDC, joellis@ldc.upenn.edu)
Kira Griffitt (LDC, kiragrif@ldc.upenn.edu)
Ralph Grishman (New York University, grishman@cs.nyu.edu)
Heng Ji (City University of New York, hengji@cs.qc.cuny.edu)
Xuansong Li (LDC, xuansong@ldc.upenn.edu)
Paul McNamee (Johns Hopkins University, paul.mcnamee@jhuapl.edu)
Boyan Onyshkevych (U.S. Department of Defense)
Stephanie M. Strassel (LDC, strassel@ldc.upenn.edu)