Challenge: Spock Challenge

Entity Resolution/Cross-document coreference: $50,000 Spock Challenge

Spock (http://www.spock.com/), a search application for people based in
Silicon Valley, is announcing the launch of The Spock Challenge.  Spock has
selected one of its most interesting problems, namely Entity Resolution, to
share with the technical community, allowing other leading computer
scientists and engineers to compete in an open contest . The winners of
this global competition will reap a reward of $50,000 cash. Spock will also
be issuing prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.

The crux of the Entity Resolution problem is clustering web documents
accurately.  For example, how do you programmatically determine whether a
web document about Michael Jackson describes the singer, or the football
player?  In order to constrain the problem so that it can be successfully
solved by an individual or a small team, Spock is providing real world data
with ground
truth annotations. This data contains 100,000 documents about people, and
the challenge is to determine all the distinct people described in the data
set. This data can be your training set. Once you’ve got your basic
algorithm working against the training set, Spock will let you further tune
your code by running it against a second test data set.

Participants can compete in the challenge individually or in teams.  The
competition will last 4 months and a leader board will be set up so that
participants can submit their program and see how they rank compared to
other submissions.

More details can be found at http://challenge.spock.com . To contact Spock,
e-mail [email protected]