Call for Participation
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CFP in Shared Task on Consumer Health Information Search (CHIS) collocated with the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) 2016 on 8th - 10th December 2016, Kolkata
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World Wide Web is increasingly being used by consumers as an aid for health decision making and for self-management of chronic illnesses as evidenced by the fact that one in every 20 searches on google is about health. Information access mechanisms for factual health information retrieval have matured considerably, with search engines providing Fact checked Health Knowledge Graph search results to factual health queries. It is pretty straightforward to get an answer to the query “what are the symptoms of Diabetes” from the search engines. However retrieval of relevant multiple perspectives for complex health search queries which do not have a single definitive answer still remains elusive with most of the general purpose search engines. The presence of multiple perspectives with different grades of supporting evidence (which is dynamically changing over time due to the arrival of new research and practice evidence) makes it all the more challenging for a lay searcher.

We use the term “Consumer Health Information Search” (CHIS) to denote such information retrieval search tasks, for which there is “No Single Best Correct Answer”; Instead multiple and diverse perspectives/points of view (which very often are contradictory in nature) are available on the web regarding the queried information. The goal of CHIS track is to research and develop techniques to support users in complex multi-perspective health information queries.
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TASK SUMMARY
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Given a CHIS query, and a document/set of documents associated with that query, the FIRST task is to classify the sentences in the document as relevant to the query or not. The relevant sentences are those from that document, which are useful in providing the answer to the query. The SECOND task is to classify these relevant sentences as supporting the claim made in the query, or opposing the claim made in the query.

Example query: Does daily aspirin therapy prevent heart attack?

S1: “Many medical experts recommend daily aspirin therapy for preventing heart attacks in people of age fifty and above.” [affirmative/Support]

S2: “While aspirin has some role in preventing blood clots, daily aspirin therapy is not for everyone as a primary heart attack prevention method”. [disagreement/Oppose]
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IMPORTANT DATES:
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REGISTRATION: http://goo.gl/forms/5Y8TVDpwPR3R42GF2 (OPEN)
First set of Training Data Release: 15th June 2016
Final set of Training Data Release: 1st August 2016 (we are mailing the dataset to registered participants.)
Test Data Release: 1st September 2016
Run Submission Deadline: 15th September 2016
Results Declared: 1st October 2016
Working Notes Due: 15th October 2016
Conference: 8-10 December 2016
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Contact email:
manjira.sinha@xerox.com; sandya.mannarswamy@xerox.com
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Track Organizers
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Shourya Roy, Xerox Research Centre India
Manjira Sinha, Xerox Research Centre India
Sandya Mannarswamy, Xerox Research Centre India
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