[Corpora-List] Call for participation: NLP to understand the financial crisis (an "unshared" task)

[Noah A Smith]

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

NLP Unshared Task in PoliInformatics 2014

Website:  https://sites.google.com/site/unsharedtask2014/

Contact: unsharedtask at gmail.com

The financial crisis of 2007-8 was an extremely complex, world-wide event.
 The U.S. government's response to the crisis was arguably as complex, but
better documented.  We invite researchers with natural language processing
expertise to consider a corpus of reports, hearings, bills, and other
transcripts related to the crisis.  We have organized a research
competition around the data and these questions:

* Who was the financial crisis?  We seek to understand the participants in
the lawmaking and regulatory processes that formed the government’s
response to the crisis: the individuals, industries, and professionals
targeted by those policies; the agencies and organizations responsible for
implementing them; and the lobbyists, witnesses, advocates, and politicians
who were actively involved -- and the connections among them.

* What was the financial crisis? We seek to understand the cause(s) of the
crisis, proposals for reform, advocates for those proposals, arguments for
and against, policies ultimately adopted by the government, and the impact
of those policies.

Contrasting with “shared tasks” -- common exercises in the NLP community --
an unshared task does not specify a quantitative performance measure for
comparing solutions and does not even specify what a solution might look
like.  Instead, the organizers provide data and an open-ended prompt.
Participants are invited to explore the use of NLP methods to help scholars
in political science, communications, and other related fields make sense
of a large, complicated corpus.  Participants are invited to show what they
can do in the form of short papers describing exploratory research and
optional demos.  We believe many such papers will discuss quantitative and
qualitative analysis of existing NLP tools and systems on portions of the
data, though new implementations are also welcome, as are newly processed
datasets that may be more directly usable in future research projects.

Papers will be reviewed by a panel of judges. These judges will author
public responses discussing the relevance of unshared task submissions,
suggesting uses in that may be unfamiliar to NLP researchers, as well as
new research directions.  Above all, an emphasis is placed on evaluating
the potential for future interdisciplinary research stemming from unshared
task entries. In addition, the panel of judges may present an award to the
entry (or entries) with the greatest potential. Our hope is that new
collaborations between NLP researchers and those with substantive interests
in political science will develop as a result of the unshared task.

Timeline

* January 1, 2014:  official data release
* February 14, 2014:  deadline to register your team
* April 15, 2014:  deadline for unshared task submissions
* May 31, 2014:  deadline for public reviews from the panel of judges
* June 26, 2014:  announcement of awardees at the ACL Workshop on Language
Technologies and Computational Social Science in Baltimore, Maryland (
http://www.mpi-sws.org/~cristian/LACSS_2014.html)

The data are described and can be downloaded at this URL, which also
provides a link to register:
https://sites.google.com/site/unsharedtask2014/

Who is organizing this competition?

PoliInformatics leverages advances in computer science, machine learning,
and data visualization to promote analyses of very large and unstructured
datasets related to the study of government and politics. The
PoliInformatics Research Coordination Network (PInet;
http://poliinformatics.org) is a working group funded by the National
Science Foundation to build community and capacity for data-intensive
research using open government data. PInet has focused its work on the
2007-8 financial crisis, government policy relating to the crisis, and
public response to that policy.  PInet has provided the data and the panel
of judges who will respond to the unshared task entries.

The NLP unshared task in PoliInformatics is being organized by:

* Claire Cardie, Cornell University
* Noah Smith, Carnegie Mellon University
* Anne Washington, George Mason University
* John Wilkerson, University of Washington
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