A quick update on the TREC Entity track, which reminds me of the classical good news-bad news situation. The good news is that we have just reached 100 members on the TREC entity mailing list. The bad news is that almost all of them are mute.
On a more serious account, the track guidelines need to get finalized very soon. One way of interpreting the silence is that people are happy with the proposed task and all details are clear. There may be other (less positive) interpretations. Whichever the case might be, in the absence of discussion, organizers will simply dictate what is to be done.
Benchmarks
Back on TREC
Yes, things have been quiet lately on the TREC Entity homepage. Now that training topics have been made available, I sincerely hope that this is about to change. We are in the process of developing test topics and finalizing the guidelines, so make sure your voice is heard if you want something different…
TREC Entity – draft guidelines available
The first year of the track will investigate the problem of related entity finding. Given the name and homepage of an entity, as well as the type of the target entity, find related entities that are of target type. Entity types are limited to people, organizations, and products. Participating systems need to return homepages of related entities, and, optionally, a string answer that represents the entity concisely (i.e., the name of the entity).
The draft guidelines are available at this page.