— SemEval-2018 Task: Counting Events and Participants in the Long Tail

Marten Postma, Filip Ilievski, and Piek Vossen from CLTL are hosting task 5 at SemEval-2018, entitled “Counting Events and Participants within Highly Ambiguous Data covering a very Long Tail”. This is a “referential quantification” task that requires systems to establish the meaning, reference and identity of events and participants in news articles. The task data (texts and answers) are prepared in such a way that the task deliberately exhibits large ambiguity and variation, as well as coverage of long tail phenomena by including a substantial amount of low-frequent, local events and entities. More information about this referential quantification task can be found in this handout or at the task website.

We see much relevance and urgency for the semantic NLP community to improve our understanding and the performance on the wide range of long tail phenomena in language. Hence, as announced last month, next to the task we will organize a “SLT-1: Semantics of the Long Tail” workshop at IJCNLP2017 that also concerns the long tail problem in semantic NLP.

If you share the opinion that this topic is crucial for the future of semantic NLP, please consider joining us, by participating in this SemEval task, and/or submitting to the “Semantics of the Long Tail” workshop.