[Corpora-List] Cross-document coreference/Entity Resolution: $50,000 Spock Challenge

[Christopher Manning]

Hello,

Here's an opportunity for anyone interested to apply their entity  
resolution techniques....

Chris

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$50,000 Spock Challenge

Spock (http://www.spock.com/), a search application for people based  
in Silicon Valley, is announcing the launch of The Spock Challenge.  
Spock has selected one of its most interesting problems, namely  
Entity Resolution, to share with the technical community, allowing  
other leading computer scientists and engineers to compete in an open  
contest . The winners of this global competition will reap a reward  
of $50,000 cash. Spock will also be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd  
place.
The crux of the Entity Resolution problem is clustering web documents  
accurately.  For example, how do you programmatically determine  
whether a web document about Michael Jackson describes the singer, or  
the football player?  In order to constrain the problem so that it  
can be successfully solved by an individual or a small team, Spock is  
providing real world data with ground truth annotations. This data  
contains 100,000 documents about people, and the challenge is to  
determine all the distinct people described in the data set. This  
data can be your training set. Once you’ve got your basic algorithm  
working against the training set, Spock will let you further tune  
your code by running it against a second test data set.

Participants can compete in the challenge individually or in teams.  
The competition will last 4 months and a leader board will be set up  
so that participants can submit their program and see how they rank  
compared to other submissions.

More details can be found at http://challenge.spock.com . To contact  
Spock, e-mail info at corp.spock.com