Call for Participation: The 2nd Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task
Information Retrieval


Organized by the 4th Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning

In collocation with EMNLP 2024

Website: https://sigtyp.github.io/st2024-mrl.html

With the advancement of language models accessing and processing tons of
information in different formats and languages, it has become of great
importance to be able to assess the capabilities to access and provide the
right information useful to different audiences. Large language models
(LLMs) continue to demonstrate outstanding performance in many applications
that require competence in language understanding and generation, but this
performance is especially prominent in English, where large amounts of
public evaluation benchmarks for various downstream tasks are available and
the extent to which language models can be reliably deployed in terms of
different languages and domains are not still well established.

In this new shared task we provide new high-quality annotations in a
selected set of data-scarce and typologically-diverse languages that can be
used in evaluation of multilingual LLMs in information retrieval tasks;
including Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Reading Comprehension (RC), on
test sets curated from articles on Wikipedia. The main objective of the
shared task is to assess and understand the multilingual characteristics of
the inference capability of multilingual LLMs in understanding and
generating language based on logical, factual or causal relationships
between knowledge contained over long contexts of text, especially under
low-resource settings.

Task and Evaluation

Our task provides a multi-task evaluation format that assesses reading
comprehension capabilities of language models in terms of two subtasks:
named entity recognition and question answering.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a classification task that identifies
phrases in a text that refer to entities or predefined categories (such as
dates, person, organization and location names) and it is an important
capability for information access systems that perform entity look-ups for
knowledge verification, spell-checking or localization applications.

The objective of the system is to tag the named entities in a given text as
person (PER), organization (ORG), location (LOC), and date (DATE) (Our tag
set uses $$ as delimiter).

Question answering (QA) is an important capability that enables responding
to natural language questions with answers found in text. Here we focus on
the information-seeking scenario where questions can be asked without
knowing the answer—it is the system’s job to locate a suitable answer
passage (if any). The information-seeking question-answer pairs tend to
exhibit less lexical and morphosyntactic overlap between the question and
answer since they are written separately, which is a more suitable setting
to evaluate typologically-diverse languages.

Here, the system is given a question, title, and a passage and the system
must pick the right answer among a list of 4 different potential options.

We evaluate model performance in the generative task terms of the accuracy
in the multi-choice answering task, and the F1 accuracy in the NER task. We
obtain a final score by averaging the scores of QA and NER.

Data and Languages

Teams can use any resources relevant to the task.

The test sets for official evaluation will be released one week before the
submission date, and will be in the following languages:

   -

   Turkish
   -

   Uzbek
   -

   Indonesian
   -

   Alemannic
   -

   Yoruba
   -

   Igbo


Important dates


   -

   June 15, 2024: Release of validation data
   -

   August 1, 2024: Release of test data
   -

   August 20, 2024: Deadline to release external data and resources used in
   systems
   -

   September 1, 2024: Deadline for submission of systems , and release of
   external data and resources used in systems.
   -

   September 20, 2024: Release of rankings and results
   -

   September 30, 2024: Deadline for submitting system description papers
   (All deadlines are 11.59 pm UTC -12h (“anywhere on Earth”))


Organizers

Duygu Ataman

David Ifeoluwa Adelani

Mammad Hajili

Francesco Tinner

Inder Khatri

Shared Task Prize

The winning team will receive an award of 500 USD and will be given a
presentation during the workshop.

--
Duygu Ataman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University
www.duyguataman.com
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