Call for Participation [DisCoTEX]: Assessing DIScourse COherence in Italian TEXts shared task @ EVALITA 2023

[Apologies for cross-posting]
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First Call for Participation
Assessing DIScourse COherence in Italian TEXts (DisCoTEX) shared task @ EVALITA 2023
Info: https://sites.google.com/view/discotex/home
Final Workshop: September 7th-8th, 2023 – Parma, Italy

We invite interested parties from academia and industry to participate in the DisCoTEX Task, which will be held in the context of Evalita 2023.
DisCoTEX is the first shared task focused on modeling discourse coherence for Italian real-word texts. Coherence is a key property of any well-organized text and it plays a fundamental role in human discourse processing as well as in a number of NLP applications. Inspired by previous literature on coherence modeling, the DisCoTEX task will be articulated into two subtasks:
1. Last sentence classification: this is conceived as a binary classification task. Specifically, given a short textual passage and an individual sentence, participants will be asked to predict whether the sentence follows or not, thus joining it to the passage gives out a coherent or incoherent passage.
2. Human score prediction: this is conceived as a regression task in which participants will be asked to predict the average coherence score assigned by human raters to short passages (either in their original or modified version).
Participants are free to participate in either one of them or both. More details about the definition, source data, and evaluation are available on the website.

Given the novelty of the task and the crucial role that coherence modeling plays in a variety of application scenarios, we expect to attract groups from communities working on distinct fields, such as automatic essay scoring, readability assessment and document summarization. Moreover, we hope that beyond the competition, the task would rise the interest of scholars working on theoretical models of coherence from a linguistic and a cognitive perspective, as well as those involved in the interpretability of current models based on deep learning networks.
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Important Dates
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7th February 2023: development data available to participants
30th April 2023: registration closes
2nd-19th May 2023: evaluation windows
30th May 2023: assessment returned to participants
14th June 2023: final reports (from participants) due to task organizers
28th June 2023: final reports (from task organizers) due to EVALITA chairs
10th July 2023: review deadline
25th July 2023: camera ready version deadline
7th-8th September 2023: final workshop in Parma

Updates will be made available in the Evalita 2023 website (https://www.evalita.it/campaigns/evalita-2023/), check it often.

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Organizers
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Dominique Brunato*
Davide Colla**
Felice Dell'Orletta*
Irene Dini*
Daniele Paolo Radicioni**
Andrea Amelio Ravelli*

* ItaliaNLP Lab, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale  "Antonio Zampolli" (ILC-CNR), Pisa
** Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino

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Contacts
discotex.evalita2023@gmail.com
Feel free to contact us for further information!
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The DisCoTEX organizing committee





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Daniele Radicioni, PhD
Department of Computer Science
University of Turin
Corso Svizzera, 185
10149 - Torino
phone: +39 011 6706802
fax:   +39 011 751603
http://www.di.unito.it/~radicion