We are very pleased to announce REPROLANG 2020, the Shared Task on the Reproduction of Research Results in Science and Technology of Language, organized by ELRA – European Language Resources Association with the technical support of CLARIN – European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology, as part of the LREC 2020 conference.
Background
Scientific knowledge is grounded on falsifiable predictions and thus its credibility and raison d’être relies on the possibility of repeating experiments and getting similar results as originally obtained and reported. In many young scientific areas, including ours, acknowledgement and promotion of the reproduction of research results need very much to be increased.
For this reason, a special track on reproducibility is included into the LREC 2020 conference regular program (side by side with other sessions on other topics) for papers on reproduction of research results, and the present specific community-wide shared task is launched to elicit and motivate the spread of scientific work on reproduction. This initiative builds on the previous pioneer LREC workshops on reproducibility 4REAL 2016 and 4REAL 2018.
Shared task
The shared task is of a new type: it is partly similar to the usual competitive shared tasks — in the sense that all participants share a common goal; but it is partly different to previous shared tasks — in the sense that its primary focus is on seeking support and confirmation of previous results, rather than on overcoming those previous results with superior ones. Thus instead of a competitive shared task, with each participant struggling for an individual top system that scores as far as possible from a rough baseline, this will be a cooperative shared task, with participants struggling for systems that reproduce as close as possible an original complex research experiment and thus eventually reinforcing the level of reliability on its results by means of their eventually convergent outcomes. Concomitantly, like with competitive shared tasks, in the process of participating in the collaborative shared task, new ideas for improvement and new advances beyond the reproduced results find here an excellent ground to be ignited.
We invite researchers to reproduce the results of a selected set of articles, which have been offered by the respective authors with their consent to be used for this shared task: see selected tasks. Papers submitted for this task are expected to report on reproduction findings, to document how the results of the original paper were reproduced, to discuss reproducibility challenges, to inform on time, space or data requirements found concerning training and testing, to ponder on lessons learned, to elaborate on recommendations for best practices, etc.
Submissions that in addition to the reproduction exercise, report also on results of the replication of the selected tasks with other languages, domains, data sets, models, methods, algorithms, downstream tasks, etc. are also encouraged. These should permit to gain insight also into the robustness of the replicated approaches, their learning curves and potential of incremental performance, their capacity of generalization, their transferability across experimental circumstances and into eventual real-life usage scenarios, their suitability to support further progress, etc.
Publication
LREC conferences have one of the top h5-index scores of research impact among the world class venues for research on Human Language Technology.
Accepted papers for the shared task will be published in the Proceedings of the LREC 2020 main conference. LREC Proceedings are freely available from ELRA and ACL Anthology. They are indexed in Scopus (Elsevier) and in DBLP. LREC 2010, LREC 2012 and LREC 2014 Proceedings are included in the Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index (the other editions are being processed).
Substantially extended versions of papers selected by reviewers as the most appropriate will be considered for publication in special issues of the Language Resources and Evaluation Journal published by Springer (a SCI-indexed journal).
Important dates
- November 25, 2019: deadline for paper submission (aligned with LREC 2020)
- November 27: deadline for projects in gitlab.com to go public
- February 14, 2020: notification of acceptance
- May 11-16: LREC conference takes place
Presentation
Papers accepted for publication will be presented in a specific session of the LREC main conference. There is no difference in quality between oral and poster presentations. Only the appropriateness of the type of communication (more or less interactive) to the content of the paper will be considered. The format of the presentations will be decided by the Program Committee. The proceedings will include both oral and poster papers in the same format.
Registration
For a selected paper to be included in the programme and to be published in the proceedings, at least one of its authors must register for the LREC 2020 conference by the early bird registration deadline. A single registration only covers one paper, following the general LREC policy on registration. Registration service is to be found at the LREC 2020 website.
Contacts
About the shared task:
Piek Vossen
p.t.j.m.vossen [at] vu.nl (piek[dot]vossen[at]vu[dot]nl)
About the preparation and submission of materials:
reprolang-tc [at] clarin.eu (reprolang-tc[at]clarin[dot]eu)
Event website: http://wordpress.let.vupr.nl/lrec-reproduction/
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Marseille
France