[Corpora-List] Final Call for Participation: WebCLEF 2008 - Web Information Synthesis

[Valentin Jijkoun]

[ IMPORTANT: Participant registration deadline: April 15, 2008 ]

Call for participation: WebCLEF 2008 - Web Information Synthesis

WebCLEF is the crosslingual web track at the Cross-Language
Evaluation Forum campaign (CLEF: http://www.clef-campaign.org).
In the past three years the track focused on evaluation of
systems providing multi- and cross-lingual access to web data.

WebCLEF 2008 will repeat the task setup of the 2007 edition.  In
2008, we evaluate a multilingual information synthesis task,
where, for a given topic, participating systems are asked to
extract important snippets from web pages (fetched from the live
web and provided by the task organizers).  The systems will have
to focus on extracting, summarizing, filtering and presenting
information relevant to the topic, rather than on large scale web
search and retrieval per se.  In the 2008 edition of the task, we
will focus on refining the assessment procedure and evaluation
measures.

WebCLEF 2008 has lots of similarities with (topic-oriented)
multi-document summarization and with answering complex
questions. An important difference is that at WebCLEF, topics
may come with extensive descriptions and with many thousands of
documents from which important facts have to be mined.  In
addition, WebCLEF works with web documents, that may be very
noisy and redundant.

For WebCLEF 2008 participants, the test collection, topics,
assessments, and source code of the best performing 2007 system
are available, together with evaluation scripts, so as to create
a shared baseline.

Schedule for WebCLEF 2008:
    * February 2008: task guidelines and development data available
    * April 15, 2008: deadline for registration (through CLEF:
       http://www.clef-campaign.org)
    * April 2008: topic development (shared effort by participants)
    * May 2008: release of test collection and topic
    * June 2008: result submission
    * July 2008: evaluation (shared effort by participants)
    * August 2008: paper submission for CLEF Working Notes
    * September 2008: CLEF workshop

WebCLEF 2008 is organized by the University of Amsterdam and backed
by the following advisory board:
    * Julio Gonzalo, Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia
    * Valentin Jijkoun, University of Amsterdam
    * Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland
    * Constantin Orasan, University of Wolverhampton
    * Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam

For more details, tools, resources, and signing up please visit
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/WebCLEF/WebCLEF2008/


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