Call for participation: Morpho Challenge 2009

Unsupervised Morpheme Analysis — Morpho Challenge 2009
http://www.cis.hut.fi/morphochallenge2009/

Part of the EU Network of Excellence PASCAL Challenge Program and organized in collaboration with CLEF. Participation is open to all.

The objective of the Challenge is to design a statistical machine learning algorithm that discovers which morphemes (smallest individually meaningful units of language) words consist of. Ideally, these are basic vocabulary units suitable for different tasks, such as text understanding, machine translation, information retrieval, and statistical language modeling.

The scientific goals are:

* To learn of the phenomena underlying word construction in natural languages
* To discover approaches suitable for a wide range of languages
* To advance machine learning methodology

Morpho Challenge 2009 is a follow-up to our previous Morpho Challenge 2005, 2007 and 2008. The task of Morpho Challenge 2009 is similar to the Morpho Challenge 2008, where the aim was to find the morpheme analysis of the word forms in the data. There are some changes in the evaluation and a new Arabic task. New *Machine Translation* tasks are added (from Finnish to English and from German to English) to evaluate the performance of the morpheme analysis.

Participation in the previous challenges is by no means a prerequisite for participation in Morpho Challenge 2009. Everyone is welcome and we hope to attract many participating teams. The results will be presented in a workshop. Please read the rules and see the schedule at the home page. The datasets are available for download.

If you now decided to participate in Morpho Challenge, please contact the organizers and ask to be added in our mailing list. We will use this mailing list to provide news about the tasks, data and evaluations.

We are looking forward to an interesting challenge!