Apologies for cross-posting & please share with anybody who may be interested in this call. *** CALL FOR PARTICIPATION *** CLEF ProtestNews 2019 Extracting Protests from News Using Automated Methods https://emw.ku.edu.tr/clef-protestnews-2019/ ProtestNews 2019 is a lab that is being organized as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum 2019 (CLEF). The lab aims at extracting protest event information from news articles across multiple countries using machine learning (ML) and generalizable natural language processing (NLP). This is a sub-task of our ERC-funded research, which aims to generate a comparative protest databases for China, India, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil (emw.ku.edu.tr). The lab aims at facilitating research in line of improving generalizability of natural language processing systems. Our objective is to develop text classification and information extraction tools on one country and test them on data from different countries. The results of our task will appear in the working notes proceedings, published by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) and are presented in the CLEF 2019. Time & Place: 09-12 September 2019, Lugano - Switzerland Competition is organized using Codalab. Competition website : https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/22349 We offer three subtasks and target research areas involve but not limited to: - Information Retrieval - Natural Language Processing - Machine Learning, Deep Learning - Big Data, Data Mining with a focus on generalizability. Tasks: We split the ProtestNews task in three subtasks: 1) Task 1: News article classification as protest vs. non-protest is a binary classification task that aims at discriminating between protest event related news articles and any other news article. Task 1 forms the basis of the subsequent tasks and is the first step towards extracting protest event related information from news articles. 2) Task 2: Event sentence detection aims at determining event sentences that contain an event trigger or a mention of it. Event triggers refer to the textual unit that makes a sentence to be annotated as an event sentence and an event mention is any kind of mention to that event trigger. For example; "In the attack that happened yesterday 20 people were injured." and "Today, we received news that 2 people died in the hospital after the incident." would be positive examples. 3) Task 3: Event information extraction is an event information extraction task that targets mainly events. Information such as participants, time and place of the event. So this task can be considered as a challenging Named Entity Recognition task where the participants are expected to detect not only the named entities found in the text but also be able to detect which ones are related to event. F1 measure will be used to evaluate Task 3. Subtasks two and three will be based on news articles that are labelled as protest or not for subtask 1. Participants can choose to participate in one or more of these subtasks independent of each other. The data from India will be used for training and testing. Evaluations will be done using a combination of the datasets from India and China. Participation: In order to participate go to the link and register ( http://clef2019-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/). After signing and submitting the form regarding the use of the competition data you have to register to our competition through Codalab ( http://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/22349 ). Details regarding the competition and all the important dates can be found on the competition website. Timeline: Please register before April 26, 2019 ( http://clef2019-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/). Initial Data release: April 1 (training and development sets already released !!) Intermediate Evaluations : Cycle 1: Data Release, India: April 12 Submission deadline: April 19 Scores: April 20 Cycle 2: Data Release, China: April 22 Submission deadline: May 1 Scores: May 2 Final Evaluation: Cycle 3 (final evaluation): No new data. Submission deadline: May 10 Scores: May 11 *** ORGANIZERS *** Ali Hürriyetoglu: ahurriyetoglu@ku.edu.tr Deniz Yüret: dyuret@ku.edu.tr Erdem Yörük: eryoruk@ku.edu.tr Çağrı Yoltar: cyoltar@ku.edu.tr Burak Gürel: bgurel@ku.edu.tr Fırat Duruşan: fdurusan@ku.edu.tr Osman Mutlu: omutlu@ku.edu.tr Arda Akdemir: aakdemir@ku.edu.tr Theresa Gessler: Theresa.Gessler@eui.eu Peter Makarov: makarov@cl.uzh.ch *** STEERING COMMITTEE *** Aline Villavicencio Antal van den Bosch Arzucan Özgür Hristo Tanev Kemal Oflazer Sophia Ananiadou