Combined Objective & Subjective Shared Task Announcement
Call for Participation

This year we are excited to coordinate two groups who have conducted shared tasks: i2b2 and the VA, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Together, these groups will hold one task this year, that has two tracks, an objective and subjective analysis. The rationale is two fold: to encourage collaboration between the two research communities and to create an annual calendar that optimizes our mission to create, disseminate, and teach new knowledge.

Track 1: is on co-reference resolution. Participants will be asked to mark concept mentions, including pronouns, as co-referent or not. The data for this track are provided by Partners HealthCare, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (MIMIC II Database), University of Pittsburgh, and the Mayo Clinic. These data are fully de-identified and manually annotated. Part of these data have been produced by the ODIE grant (R01 CA127979, NCI/NCBI, PI Crowley) and contributed to the i2b2/VA 2011 challenge under SHARP 4 (U01 SHARP 4, ONC, PI Chute). More information along with the organizing committee and other important information can be found at i2b2.org/NLP/Coreference.

Track 2: is on sentiment classification. Participants will be asked to find emotions in suicide notes. The data come from a collection of over 1,000 notes that were written by people who have died by suicide. The data are hand annotated. This track is supported by NIH Shared Task 2010 - Analysis of Suicide Notes for Subjective Information Grant Number 1R13LM010743-01 and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. More information can be found at www.computationalmedicine.org/challenge.

Tentative Schedule
March 14, 2011 Registration Opens
June 1, 2011 Training Data Release
August 1, 2011 Test Data Release
August 3, 2011 System Outputs on Test Data Due at 11:59pm Eastern Time
September 1, 2011 Short Papers Due
September 21, 2011 Invitations to Present at the Workshop
October, 2011 Workshop

Questions about the co-reference shared task can be can be addressed to i2b2nlp@albany.edu. Questions about the sentiment classification task can be addressed to information@computationalmedicine.org.

Sincerely,
Ozlem Uzuner
John Pestian
Brett South