doc/instructions.txt

{55Second International Chinese Word Segmentation Bakeoff
Detailed Instructions

[Note: these were converted from HTML to text for this post-bakeoff
data release. No other changes were made.]

The following comprises the complete description of the training and
testing for the Second International Chinese Word Segmentation
Bakeoff. By participating in this competition, you are declaring that
you understand these descriptions, and that you agree to abide by the
specific terms as laid out below.

* Training: Description of Tracks

** Dimension 1: Corpora

Four corpora are available for this bakeoff:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corpus             Encoding         Word        Words     Character   Characters
                                    Types                   Types
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Academia Sinica    Big Five Plus   141,340    5,449,698     6,117      8,368,050
CityU              HKSCS Big Five   69,085    1,455,629     4,923      2,403,355
Peking University  CP936            55,303    1,109,947     4,698      1,826,448
Microsoft Research CP936            88,119    2,368,391     5,167      4,050,469
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You may declare that you will return results on any subset of these
corpora. For example, you may decide that you will test on the Sinica
Corpus and the Beijing University corpus. The only constraint is that
you must not select a corpus where you have knowingly had previous
access to the testing portion of the corpus. A corollary of this is
that a team may not test on the data from their own institution.

** Dimension 2: Open or Closed Test

You may decide to participate in either an open test or a closed test, or both. 

In the open test you will be allowed to train on the training set for
a particular corpus, and in addition you may use *any* other material
including material from other training corpora, proprietary
dictionaries, material from the WWW and so forth.

If you elect the open test, you will be required, in the
two-page writeup of your results, to explain what percentage of your
correct/incorrect results came from which sources. For example, if you
score an F measure of 0.7 on words in the testing corpus that are
out-of-vocabulary with respect to the training corpus, you must
explain how you got that result: was it just because you have a good
coverage dictionary, do you have a good unknown word detection
algorithm, etc?

In the closed test you may *only* use training
material from the training data for the particular corpus you are
testing on. No other material or knowledge is allowed, including
(but not limited to):

1. Part-of-speech information
2. Externally generated word-frequency counts
3. Arabic and Chinese Numbers
4. Feature characters for place ames
5. Common Chinese surnames

** Declaration

When you download the training corpora, you will be asked to register
and provide various information about your site, including the contact
person, and you will be asked to declare which tracks you will
participating in.

** Format of the data

Both training and testing data will be published in the original
coding schemes used by the data sources. Additionally it will be
transcoded by the organizers into Unicode UTF-8 (or, if provided in
Unicode, into the defacto encoding for the locale.) The training data
will be formatted as follows.

1. There will be one sentence per line.
2. Words and punctuation symbols will be separated by spaces.
3. There will be no further annotations, such as part-of-speech tags:
   if the original corpus includes those, those will be removed.


** Licensing

The corpora have been made available by the providers for the purposes
of this competition only. By downloading the training and testing
corpora, you agree that you will not use these corpora for any other
purpose than as material for this competition. Petitions to use the
data for any other purpose MUST be directed to the original providers
of the data. Neither SIGHAN nor the ACL will assume any liability for
a participant's misuse of the data.

* Testing

The test data will be available for each corpus at the website at
12:00 GMT, July 27, 2005. The test data will be in the same format as
described for the training data, but of course spaces will be removed.

You will have roughly two days to process the data, format the
results and return them to the SIGHAN website. The final due
date/time is:

July 29, 2005, 12:00, GMT

Late submissions will not be scored.

The format of the result must adhere to the format
described for the training data. In particular, there must be one line
per sentence, and there must be the same number of lines in the
returned data as in the data available from the site. Segmented words
and punctuation must be separated by spaces, and there should be
no further annotations (e.g. part of speech tags) on
the segmented words. The data must be returned in the same
coding scheme as they were published in. (For example, If you
utilize the UTF-8 encoded version of the testing data, then the
results must be returned in UTF-8.) Participants are reminded that
ASCII character codes may occur in Chinese text to represent Latin
letters, numbers and so forth: such codes should be left in their
original coding scheme. Do not convert them to their GB/Big5
equivalents. Similarly GB/Big5 codings of Latin letters or Arabic
numerals should be left in their original coding, and not converted to
ASCII.

The results will be scored completely automatically. The scripts that
were used to score will be made publicly available. The measures that
will be reported are precision, recall, and an evenly-weighted
F-measure. We will also report scores for in-vocabulary and
out-of-vocabulary words.

Note: by downloading the test material and submitting results on this
material you are thereby declaring that you have not previously seen
the test material for the given corpus.

You are also declaring that your testing will be fully automatic. This
means that any kind of manual intervention is disallowed, including,
but not limited to:

1. Manual correction of the output of your segmentation.
2. Prepopulating the dictionary with words derived by a manual
   inspection of the test corpus.

* Results

Results will be provided in two phases. Privately to individual
participants by August 5, 2005, then publicly to all participants and
to the community at large at the SIGHAN Workshop. By participating in
this contest, you are agreeing that the results of the test may be
published, including the names of the participants.

* Writeup

By electing to participate in any part of this contest, you are
agreeing to provide, by August 19, 2005, a two-page writeup that
briefly describes your segmentation system, and a summary of your
results. In the closed tests you may describe the technical details of
how you came by the particular results. In the open test you must
describe the technical details of how you came by the particular
results.

The format of the two-page paper must adhere to the style guidelines
for IJCNLP-05, except for the two page limit and the submission via
the SIGHAN site.