[Corpora-List] TUNA Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2009: First Call for Participation

Fri Aug 15 12:22:45 UTC 2008

FIRST CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

TUNA REFERRING EXPRESSION GENERATION CHALLENGE 2009
---------------------------------------------------

Part of Generation Challenges 2009, in conjunction with ENLG 2009.

Generation Challenges 2009 is being organised to provide a common
forum for a number of different NLG Shared Tasks (see
http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/).

As part of Generation Challenges 2009, we are organising a TUNA
Progress Test. This will be the third, and final, shared task
involving the TUNA Corpus of referring expressions. TUNA was first
used in the Pilot Attribute Selection for Generating Referring
Expressions (ASGRE) Challenge, which took place between May and
September 2007; and again for three of the shared tasks in the
Referring Expression Generation (REG) Challenge 2008, which was
completed in May and presented during a special session at
INLG'08. The TUNA'09 Task replicates one of the three tasks from REG
2008, the TUNA-REG Task. It uses the same test data, to enable direct
comparison against the 2008 results.

1. Background
--------------

Referring Expression Generation (REG) has been the subject of
intensive research in the NLG community, giving rise to significant
consensus on the problem definition, as well as the nature of the
inputs and outputs of REG algorithms. Typically, such algorithms take
as input a domain, consisting of objects and their attributes,
together with an intended referent, and output a set of attributes
true of the referent which distinguish it from other objects in the
domain. An additional stage is to map these attributes to a natural
language expression (usually a noun phrase).

2. Data
--------

The TUNA Corpus consists of a set of human-produced descriptions of
objects in a visual domain of pictures of furniture and people,
annotated at the semantic level and paired with a domain
representation. In addition to the domain, each description is
provided as a word string (i.e. the original human-produced
description), as the set of attributes included in the description,
and as a combination of the two (where the word string is annotated
with the attributes).

The corpus was collected via an elicitation experiment, in which one
between-subjects condition controlled the use of the location of an
object in descriptions (+/-Location).  In keeping with the earlier
shared tasks involving TUNA, only the singular data will be used for
the TUNA'09 Task.

For the REG Challenge 2008, a new test set was generated by
replicating the original experiment. This test set has not been
released in any form, and will be used again for the 2009 edition.

For full details about the data collection and corpus annotation
scheme, see: http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/~agatt/pubs/tuna-corpus.pdf

3. The TUNA'09 Task
-------------------

The TUNA'09 Task is a replication of the TUNA-REG Task carried out as
part of REG Challenges 2008. As in REG Challenges 2008, there will be
a variety of evaluation methods to compare systems (see Section 4
below), and participants can choose which of the evaluation criteria
to optimise for.

1. Input: Following the standard REG problem definition, the input will
   be a TUNA domain representation, consisting of objects and their
   properties, with one object designated as the intended referent.
2. Output: Participating systems will need to map from a TUNA domain
   representation to a natural language description that describes the
   target referent.

4. Evaluation
-------------

The TUNA data set is composed of the following subsets:

1. A development set consisting of 150 corpus items (input domain + human
   description), divided into furniture and people descriptions;
2. A training set consisting of 593 corpus items (input domain + human
   description), divided into furniture and people descriptions;
3. A test set consisting of 112 corpus items (input domain only),
   divided into furniture and people descriptions. This test set was
   created through a replication of the original TUNA elicitation
   experiment. It was built so that for every input domain there are two
   human-authored outputs by different individuals. Evaluation of
   system-produced descriptions will be carried out by averaging against
   both human descriptions in the corresponding input domain.

Participants will compute evaluation scores on the development set
(using code provided by the organisers), and the organisers will
perform evaluations on the test data set.  We will again use a range
of different evaluation methods, including intrinsic and extrinsic,
automatically assessed and human-evaluated.  Intrinsic evaluations
assess properties of peer systems in their own right, whereas
extrinsic evaluations assess the effect of a peer system on something
that is external to it, such as its effect on human performance at a
given task or the added value it brings to an application.

Full details of the evaluation methods will be announced to registered
participants.

6. Participation
----------------

Registration is now open at the TUNA'09 Task homepage
(http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/tuna).  Once they
have registered, participants will be sent the TUNA'09 Participants'
Pack which includes complete documentation and the training and
development data sets.

7. Proceedings and Presentations
--------------------------------

The Generation Challenges 2009 meeting will be held as a special
session at ENLG 2009. The session will include overviews of all the
shared tasks, including the TUNA'09 Task. The participating systems
will additionally be presented as papers in the ENLG'09 proceedings,
and as posters during the ENLG'09 poster session.

TUNA'09 Challenge Papers will not undergo a selection procedure with
multiple reviews, but the organisers reserve the right to reject
material which is not appropriate given the participation guidelines.

8. Important Dates
------------------

Aug 15, 2008  First Call for Participation in TUNA'09 Task; TUNA'09 data
              sets available
Dec 1-31, 08  TUNA'09 test data submission:
	      1. submit system report; 2. download test data; 3. submit
              outputs within 48h
Dec 31, 2009  Final deadline for submission of TUNA'09 test data outputs
Jan 01-31, 09 TUNA'09 Evaluation period
Mar 01, 2009  Submission deadline for camera-ready papers and reports
Mar 30-31, 09 Generation Challenges 2009 meeting at ENLG'09 (dates to be
              confirmed)

9. Organisation
---------------

Albert Gatt, Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, UK
Anja Belz, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK
Eric Kow, NLTG, University of Brighton, UK

TUNA'09 Task homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09/tuna
Generation Challenges homepage: http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/research/genchal09
Generation Challenges email: nlg-stec at itri.brighton.ac.uk

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