We invite you to participate in the Perspective-Aware Healthcare Answer Summarization (PerAnsSumm) Shared Task, focusing on creating perspective-aware summaries from healthcare community question-answering (CQA) forums.

The results will be presented at the CL4Health Workshop, co-located with the NAACL 2025 conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The publication venue for system descriptions will be the proceedings of the CL4Health workshop, also co-published in the ACL anthology.

== TASK DESCRIPTION ==
Healthcare CQA forums provide diverse user perspectives, from personal experiences to factual advice and suggestions. However, traditional summarization approaches often overlook this richness by focusing on a single best-voted answer. The PerAnsSumm shared task seeks to address this gap with two main challenges:

* Task A: Identifying and classifying perspective-specific spans in CQA answers.
* Task B: Generating structured, perspective-specific summaries for the entire question-answer thread.

This task aims to build tools that provide users with concise summaries catering to varied informational needs.

== DATA ==
Participants will be provided with:
* Training and validation datasets, accessible via CodaBench.
* A separate test set for evaluation. (Unseen)
A starter code is also available to make it easier for participants to get started.

== EVALUATION ==
System submissions will be evaluated based on automatic metrics, with a focus on the accuracy and relevance of the summaries. Further details can be found on the task website: https://peranssumm.github.io/
CodaBench Competition Page: https://www.codabench.org/competitions/4312/

== PRIZES ==
* 1st Place: $100
* 2nd Place: $50

== TIMELINE ==
* Second call for participation: 5th December, 2024
* Release of task data (training, validation): 12th November, 2024
* Release of test data: 25th January, 2025
* Results submission deadline: 1st February, 2025
* Release of final results: 5th February, 2025
* System papers due: 25th February, 2025
* Notification of acceptance: 7th March, 2025
* Camera-ready papers due: TBC
* CL4Health Workshop: 3rd or 4th May, 2025

== PUBLICATION ==
We encourage participants to submit a system description paper to the CL4Health Workshop at NAACL 2025. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings and co-published in the ACL Anthology. All papers will be reviewed by the organizing committee. Upon paper publication, we encourage you to share models, code, fact sheets, extra data, etc., with the community through GitHub or other repositories.

== ORGANIZERS ==
Shweta Yadav, University of Illinois Chicago, USA
Md Shad Akhtar, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, India
Siddhant Agarwal, University of Illinois Chicago, USA

== CONTACT ==
Please join the Google group at https://groups.google.com/g/peranssumm-shared-task-2025 or email us at peranssumm@gmail.com with any questions or clarifications.