[open-linguistics] ESWC 2014 Call for Challenge: Semantic Publishing

[speroni at cs.unibo.it]

** apologies for cross-posting **

==== Call for Challenge: Semantic Publishing ====

Challenge Website: http://challenges.2014.eswc-conferences.org/SemPub
Call Web page: http://2014.eswc-conferences.org/important-dates/call-SemPub

MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES
Scholarly publishing is increasingly enabling a new wave of applications that better support researchers in disseminating, exploiting and evaluating their results. The potential of publishing scientific papers enriched with semantic information is huge and raises interesting and challenging issues. Semantic Web technologies play a central role in this context, as they can help publishers to make scientific results available in an open format the whole research community can benefit from.
The Semantic Publishing Challenge 2014 is intended to be the first in a series of events at ESWC for producing and exploiting semantic publishing data. The main focus this year is on extracting information and using this information to assess the quality of scientific productions.
Linked open datasets about scientific production exist - e.g. DBLP - but they usually cover basic bibliographic information, which is not sufficient to assess quality. Quality-related information, such as the number of journal articles that cite a given publication, or the number of times a workshop has been run by the same chairs and received many submissions, or the actual function of a citation are often hidden and not yet available as LOD. The main goal of the Challenge is to build high-quality LOD that contains such information.
Moving off this year's outcomes, we plan to investigate the final publication and exploitation side in the next editions.

TARGET AUDIENCE
The Challenge is open to everyone from industry and academia.

TASKS
We ask challengers to automatically annotate a set of multi-format and multi-source input documents and to produce a Linked Open Dataset that fully describes these documents, their context, and relevant parts of their content. The evaluation will consist of evaluating a set of queries against the produced dataset to assess its correctness and completeness.
The input dataset will be split in two parts: a training/testing part and an evaluation part, which will disclosed a few days before the submission deadline. Participants will be asked to run their tool on the evaluation dataset and to produce the final Linked Open Dataset.
Further details about the organization of the Challenge will be provided. The Challenge will include two tasks:

Task 1: Extraction and assessment of workshop proceedings information
Participants are required to extract information from a set of HTML tables of contents, partly including microformat and RDFa annotations but not necessarily being valid HTML, of selected computer science workshop proceedings published with the CEUR-WS.org open access service. The extracted information is expected to answer queries about the quality of these workshops, for instance by measuring their growth, longevity, connection with other events, distribution of papers and authors.

Task 2: Extraction and characterization of citations
Participants are required to extract information about the citations in scientific journals and their relevance. Input documents are in XML JATS and TaxPub, an official extension of JATS customized for taxonomic treatments, and selected from the PubMedCentral Open Access Subset and the Pensoft Biodiversity Data Journal and ZooKeys archive. The extracted information is expected to be used for assessing the value of citations, for instance by considering their position in the paper, their co-location with other citations or their purpose.

EVALUATION
Participants will be requested to submit the LOD that their tool produces from the evaluation dataset, as well as a paper that describes their approach. They will also be given a set of queries in natural language form and will be asked to translate those queries into a SPARQL form that works on their LOD.
The results of the queries on the produced LOD will be compared with the expected output, and precision and recall will be measured to identify the best performing approach. Separately, the most original approach will be assigned by the Program Committee.
Further details about the evaluation will be provided on the challenge wiki.

FEEDBACK AND DISCUSSION
A discussion group is open for participants to ask questions and to receive updates about the challenge (see link at bottom). Participants are invited to subscribe to this group as soon as possible and to communicate their intention to participate. They are also invited to use this channel to discuss problems in the input dataset and to suggest changes.

JUDGING AND PRIZES
After a first round of review, the Program Committee and the chairs will select a number of submissions conforming to the challenge requirements that will be invited to present their work. Submissions accepted for presentation will receive constructive reviews from the Program Committee, they will be included in the Springer LNCS post-proceedings of ESWC, and they will have a presentation slot in a poster session dedicated to the challenge. 

In addition, the winners will present their work in a special slot of the main program of ESWC and will be invited to submit a revised and extended paper to a dedicated Semantic Web Journal special issue.

Four winners will be selected. For each of the two tasks we will select:
* best performing tool, given to the paper which will get the highest score in the evaluation
* most original approach, selected by the Challenge Committee with the reviewing process

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
Participants are required to submit:
* Abstract: no more than 200 words.
* Description: It should explain the details of the automated annotation system, including why the system is innovative, how it uses Semantic Web technology, what features or functions the system provides, what design choices were made and what lessons were learned. The description should also summarize how participants have addressed the evaluation tasks. An outlook towards how the data could be consumed is appreciated but not strictly required. Papers must be submitted in PDF format, following the style of the Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors), and not exceeding 5 pages in length.
* The Linked Open Dataset produced by their tool on the evaluation dataset (as a file or as a URL, in Turtle or RDF/XML). 
* A set of SPARQL queries that work on that LOD and correspond to the natural language queries provided as input

Participants will also be asked to submit their tool (source and/or binaries, or a link these can be downloaded from, or a web service URL) for verification purposes.
Further submission instructions will be published on the challenge wiki.

All submissions should be provided via EasyChair https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eswc2014-challenges

MAILING LIST
We invite the potential participants to subscribe to our mailing list in order to be kept up to date with the latest news related to the challenge. 

https://lists.sti2.org/mailman/listinfo/eswc2014-sempub-challenge

IMPORTANT DATES
* December 3, 2013: Publication of the full description of tasks, rules and queries; publication of the training/testing dataset
* January 15, 2014, 23:59 (Hawaii time): Deadline for making remarks to the training/testing dataset
* January 20, 2014: Publication of the final training/testing dataset
* March 7, 2014, 23:59 (Hawaii time): Abstract Submission
* March 11, 2014: Publication of the evaluation dataset
* March 14, 2014, 23:59 (Hawaii time): Submission
* April 9, 2014, 23:59 (Hawaii time): Notification of acceptance
* May 27-29, 2014: Challenge days


CHALLENGE CHAIRS
* Angelo Di Iorio (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna, IT)
* Christoph Lange (Enterprise Information Systems, University of Bonn / Fraunhofer IAIS, DE)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Soren Auer (University of Bonn / Fraunhofer IAIS, DE) (supervisor)
Sarven Capadisli (University of Leipzig, DE)
Alexander Constantin (University of Manchester, UK)
Alexander Garcia Castro (Florida State University, US)
Leyla Jael Garcia Castro (Bundeswehr University of Munich, DE)
Aidan Hogan (DERI Galway, IR)
Evangelos Milios (Dalhousie University, CA)
Lyubomir Penev (Pensoft Publishers, BG)
Robert Stevens (University of Manchester, UK)
Jun Zhao (Lancaster University, UK)

We are inviting further members.

ESWC CHALLENGE COORDINATOR
* Milan Stankovic (Sepage & Universite Paris-Sorbonne, FR)