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Call for Participation
SemEval-2010 Shared Task #9:
Noun Compound Interpretation
Using Paraphrasing Verbs and Prepositions
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfvxd49s_35hkprbcpt
--- Training data available ---
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This shared task should be of interest to researchers working on
* semantic relation extraction
* information extraction
* lexical semantics
* noun compound interpretation
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Background ============
A noun compound is a sequence of nouns acting as a single noun, e.g., colon cancer, suppressor protein, colon cancer tumor suppressor protein. Noun compounds are both highly frequent and highly productive in English, which means that achieving robust noun compound interpretation is an important goal for broad-coverage semantic processing. NLP systems cannot just ignore compounds without discarding valuable semantic information; at the same time, the only way to achieve broad coverage on compounds is to interpret them compositionally, as it is impossible to list in a lexicon all compounds that are likely to be encountered.
In this shared task, we explore the idea of interpreting the semantics of noun compounds using paraphrasing verbs and prepositions. For example, "nut bread" can be paraphrased using verbs like "contain" and "include", prepositions like "with" and verbs+prepositions like "be made from".
Unlike abstract relations such as CAUSE, CONTAINER, SOURCE, TIME, and LOCATION, which have traditionally been used for noun compound interpretation, verbs and prepositions are directly usable as paraphrases, and using multiple paraphrases simultaneously yields an appealing fine-grained semantic representation.
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The Task ==========
In a preliminary study, we asked 25-30 human subjects to paraphrase 250 noun-noun compounds using suitable paraphrasing verbs. For example, for "nut bread" we have the following paraphrases (the number of subjects who proposed each paraphrase is shown in parentheses):
contain(21); include(10); be made with(9); have(8); be made from(5); use(3); be made using(3); feature(2); be filled with(2); taste like(2); be made of(2); come from(2); consist of(2); hold(1); be composed of(1); be blended with(1); be created out of(1); encapsulate(1); diffuse(1); be created with(1); be flavored with(1); incorporate(1); be created from(1); be prepared with(1); sink under(1); comprise(1); eat up(1); be made out of(1); wreck(1); be baked using(1); cover over(1); improve with(1); taste of(1); be baked with(1); rise above(1); surround(1); be about(1)
Based on this kind of data, we propose a ranking task. The participants will be presented with a noun-noun compound and a set of corresponding paraphrasing verbs and prepositions, and will be asked to provide a ranking that is as close as possible to the ranking proposed by the humans.
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Datasets ==========
* Trial Data: We have released as trial data the paraphrasing verbs for 250 noun compounds, each paraphrased by 25-30 human subjects.
* Test Data: The test data will consist of noun-noun compounds and a set of paraphrasing verbs and prepositions associated with each of them. For each compound, the participants will need to produce a ranking, which will be compared to a gold-standard ranking for that compound. We will collect paraphrases for over 300 noun-noun compounds, each of which will be annotated by 100 human annotators.
License: All data are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
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Time Schedule ===============
* Trial data released: August 30, 2009 * Training data release: February 17, 2010
* Test data release: March 18, 2010 * Result submission deadline: 7 days after downloading the *test* data, but no later than April 2
* Organizers send the test results: April 10 * Submission of description papers: April 17, 2010 * Notification of acceptance: May 6, 2010 * SemEval'2010 workshop (at ACL): July 15-16
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Task Organizers =================
Cristina Butnariu University College Dublin Su Nam Kim University of Melbourne Preslav Nakov National University of Singapore Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha University of Cambridge Stan Szpakowicz University of Ottawa Tony Veale University College Dublin
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Useful Links ==============
Interested in participating in the shared task? Please join the following Google group: http://groups.google.com.sg/group/semeval-2010-noun-compound-interpretation- using-verbs?hl=en
Task #9 website: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfvxd49s_35hkprbcpt
SemEval 2010 website: http://semeval2.fbk.eu/semeval2.php