ALTA Shared Task 2011

Welcome to the Language Technology Programming Competition. This competition is organised by ALTA.

What is ALTA?

ALTA is the Australasian Language Technology Association. ALTA's mission is to promote language technology research and development in Australia and New Zealand. ALTA organises workshops like ALTA 2011, and supports competitions like the Australian High-School Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) and this programming competition.

What is this competition about?

This is our second programming competition and it aims at university students with programming experience. The competition is formatted as a "shared task": all participants compete to solve the same problem. The problem is the object of active research and nobody has (yet) obtained 100% correct results. In this competition, the winner will be the team who obtains the best results. If you participate and obtain 100% results you should definitely consider doing a PhD on the topic!

There are no limitations on the size of the teams or the means that they can use to solve the problem, as long as the processing is fully automatic - there should be no human intervention. We will give you a sample of data for you to use and develop your system from the point you decide to join the competition. In early October we will send test data, and you will have a few days to run your program and send us your result. After you receive the results, to qualify for the price you will also need to write a poster that describes the methods that you used to obtain the results. Selected posters will be displayed at ALTA 2011.

What do I get if I win?

The winning team of the student category will be invited to attend ALTA 2011 in Canberra. We are still looking for sponsors for additional prizes. If you are interested in sponsoring this event, contact Diego Molla (shared.task@alta.asn.au).

How do I register?

To register, send an email to Diego Molla (shared.task@alta.asn.au) with the following information:

• Name of your team;
• Name and current studies, including the current year, degree name, and university (e.g. "third year of the Bachelor of IT at Macquarie University") of each team member.

We will send you a confirmation message and the training data for this year's task.

I want to know more about the task

See the task description at the menu bar on the left for more details including dates. If you want to know more about how to solve the task, see the useful information at the menu bar.

Join the Google group for discussion and more news about the competition.

Who are the organisers?

Coordinator and main contact person (shared.task@alta.asn.au):
Diego Molla-Aliod (Macquarie University)

Preparation of the 2011 task:
Diego Molla-Aliod and Abeed Sarker (Macquarie University)

Who are the sponsors?

If you are interested in sponsoring this event, contact Diego Molla (shared.task@alta.asn.au).

Past Shared Tasks

• 2010