Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval

Community Evaluation Effort for MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) on Covid-19

Call for Participation in the First Evaluation Round - Runs due by 27 November 2020

Registration: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/registration/

Twitter: @covid19mlia

Email: info@covid19-mlia.eu

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Overall Description

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval organizes a community evaluation effort aimed at accelerating the creation of resources and tools for improved MultiLingual Information Access (MLIA) in the current emergency situation with a reference to a general public use case:

“Sofia has heard that a drug has been experimented in different countries and she would like to have a consolidated and trustworthy view of the main findings, whether the drug is effective or not, and whether there are any adverse effects”.

Distillation for the general public also implies a level of specialist-non-specialist communication, when the aggregated sources contain both disseminative and specialised sources. Therefore, the general public would need to understand medical expertise by using their correspondent in the "popular" language or by using an appropriately calibrated language for the communication to be effective.

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval adopts an incremental and iterative evaluation methodology to enable the release of intermediate (but functional) resources and to progressively (iteration-after-iteration) move towards finally consolidated tools and resources. We plan for three rounds, tentatively one and half-month long each.

Each round consists of the following phases:

data release
submission of participants’ runs
ground-truth creation (when needed)
scoring of participants’ runs
writing of the rolling technical report
round wrap virtual meeting

An integral part of the Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval approach is the sharing of information and ideas among the participants. This happens via the rolling technical report where participants describe their solutions as the evaluation rounds progress and the virtual meetings at the end of each round where participants briefly present the main highlights of what worked and what did not work and interactively discuss together in order to share ideas and improve for the next round.

Moreover, to facilitate the exchange of resources and components and to jointly work together for improving MLIA technologies for Covid-19, participants are provided with a dedicated git repository where to push and share the outcomes of your participation in the different rounds, i.e. runs, code, (language) resources, and a technical report. To facilitate sharing and re-use, all the contents of the repositories are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Tasks

Covid-19 MLIA @ Eval offers the following tasks for its first round:

Information Extraction
More information at: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/task1/
Multilingual Semantic Search

More information at: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/task2/

Machine Translation

More information at: http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/task3/

We offer tasks in the following languages: English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukranian.

Registration for the tasks is open at:

http://eval.covid19-mlia.eu/registration/

Important Dates - First Round

Registration Opens: 19 October 2020
Registration Closes: 14 May 2021
First Round Starts: 23 October 2020 (data release)
Submission of Runs: 27 November 2020
Submission of Technical Report: 8 January 2021
Round Wrap-up Virtual Meeting: 11-15 January 2021 (exact date TBD)
First Round Ends: 15 January 2021

More detailed dates are provided on the Web pages dedicated to each specific task, since the internal scheduling of each task may differ slightly to better match the task design.