Multilingual Shallow Discourse Parsing

This is the 2nd edition of the CoNLL Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing, following the first edition in 2015. A participant system is given a piece of newswire text as input and returns discourse relations in the form of a discourse connective (explicit or implicit) taking two arguments (which can be clauses, sentences, or multi-sentence segments). Specifically, the participant system needs to

locate both explicit (e.g., "because", "however") discourse connectives in the text
identify the spans of text that serve as the two arguments for each discourse connective
predict the sense of the discourse connectives (e.g., "Cause", "Contrast")
Recognizing such discourse relations is an important part of natural language understanding, which benefits a wide range of natural language applications. More detail and examples.
What's new this year?

There are a few things. More detail will be provided later.
You can choose to do the task in English and/or Chinese.
You can choose to do the supplementary task, which is sense classification using gold standard argument pairs
Evaluation based on argument partial matching

Ready to join us?

We are glad that you are. The instructions are the same whether you would like to participate in both languages and/or just the supplementary task.
Complete the registration form (one per team)
Submit the license agreement form to LDC
Download the data from the link, which LDC will send to you after a few days
Check out the resources that might be useful
Login to the evaluation platform on tira.io using your credential, which we will send to you
Clone/fork from our github repo and familiarize yourself with the data format
Start developing the parser
Stay updated

Updates and announcements will be made through the task forum. You should also read our weekly blog posts for tips, literature reviews, and interesting stuff related to discourse parsing. Last year blog might also be of interest.
Timeline

January 15, 2016: Task begins
February 29, 2016: Last day to join the task
By April 20, 2016: Test sets available
April 27, 2016 (11:59PM UTC/GMT-10): System submission deadline
May 1, 2016: Results announced to participants
May 8, 2016 (11:59PM UTC/GMT-10) : System papers due.
May 18, 2016: Reviews due.
May 21, 2016: Notification of acceptance.
May 28, 2016: Camera-ready version of system papers due.
Aug 11-12, 2016: CoNLL conference (Berlin, Germany, colocated with ACL).