*SEM Shared Task 2012: Call for Proposals
ACL special interest groups SIGLEX and SIGSEM invites proposals for the *SEM Shared Task 2012.
*SEM is the first joint conference on lexical and computational semantics. The main goal of *SEM is to provide a stable forum for the growing number of NLP researchers working on different aspects of semantic processing, which has been scattered over a large array of small workshops and conferences. The first edition of *SEM will be a two-day conference collocated with the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Human Language Technologies 2012 conference (NAACL HLT), which will take place in Montreal, Canada.
Every year *SEM is planning to include a shared task in which training and test data are provided by the organizers, which allows participating systems to be evaluated and compared in a systematic way. Descriptions of the participating systems and an evaluation of their performance will be presented both at the conference and in the proceedings. The same or similar shared tasks may be chosen for several years in a row to focus the research attention of the community on a particular semantic task. For *SEM 2012, proposals are invited for any shared task related to lexical or computational semantics.
Note that this shared task will be held in addition to the SemEval tasks. SemEval task organizers are welcome to submit their task for the shared task. If accepted, their task will be moved from SemEval to the shared task of *SEM.
Proposals should contain the following information:
- Names and affiliations of the members of the organizing committee (including a designated contact person)
- Description of the shared task, including its relevance for the study of computational and lexical semantics
- Description of the process for selecting, acquiring and preparing the data for training and evaluation, including conditions of availability
- Description of the procedure for evaluating the performance of participating systems, including the availability of evaluation software
- Any other relevant information
Proposals should be in PDF format, maximum 2 pages, and sent by e-mail to (StarSemSharedTask [at] cs.york.ac.uk):
Important Dates:
Shared Task Proposals due: 15 November 2011
Accept/Reject decision due: 25 November 2011
Any questions regarding the proposals can be sent to (StarSemSharedTask [at] cs.york.ac.uk).
The expected timeline for the *SEM shared task 2012 is as follows:
- Dec 1: general announcement
- Dec 15: call for interest in participation
- Dec 15: task website (first version with general information,
task definition, examples and calendar)
- Dec 15: trial datasets (plus documentation and scorer)
- Jan 13: registration for the task (plus corpora licenses)
- Jan 15: training and development sets available
- Feb 21: test set available
- Mar 1: systems' outputs collected
*SEM Shared Task Committee:
*SEM General Chair: Eneko Agirre
*SEM co-chairs : Johan Bos, Mona Diab
Shared Task Co-chairs : Suresh Manandhar and Deniz Yuret
Further details will be available from the *SEM website: