We invite you to participate in our multilingual stance classification shared task, as part of the Touché Lab, which will be held in conjunction with the CLEF'23 conference in Thessaloniki, Greece [1].

Context: Participatory Democracy at the scale of a continent like Europe brings many difficulties due to the high diversity of languages and cultures. At the same time, Machine Learning is an interesting tool for stance recognition in a large-scale context, in terms of data size, but also regarding the topics and themes addressed or the languages employed by the participants. Public consultations of citizens using Online Participatory Democracy platforms offer this kind of setting and are good use cases for automatic stance recognition systems. In the context of the Touché Lab at CLEF 2023 [2], we are proposing a shared task on data coming from the platform used during the Conference for the Future of Europe [2] which was inaugurated in 2021, where users can submit proposals and comment over them in any of the 24 official EU languages. A particularity of this platform is the use of a Machine Translation system in order to give the possibility to the users to interact between each others in their native languages, leading to what we call Intra-Multilingual data: pairs of proposal and comment in different languages.

[1] https://clef2023.clef-initiative.eu/ [2] https://touche.webis.de/ [3] https://futureu.europa.eu/

Tasks: Given a proposal on a socially important issue, the task is to classify whether a comment is in favor, against, or neutral towards the proposal.

Subtask1: Cross-debate Stance Classification. Subtask2: All-data-available Classification

Learn more about this and other argumentation- and causality-related tasks at https://touche.webis.de/ Data available at https://touche.webis.de/clef23/touche23-web/multilingual-stance-classificati... Register via the CLEF website: https://clef2023-labs-registration.dei.unipd.it/

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Important Dates ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now open: Registration Jan. 15, 2023: Development data available April 30, 2023: Test data available May 2, 2023: Approaches submission on the test data June 5, 2023: Participant paper submission July 7, 2023: Camera-ready participant papers submission Sep. 18-21, 2023: Conference One of the conference days: Touché Workshop on Argument and Causal Retrieval

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Touché Open Source Proceedings

Touché will host a collection of software developed by participants at GitHub. The Touché team invite you to publish your software too and invite software submissions using TIRA [ https://www.tira.io/ ].

In case of questions / suggestions / etc., please reach us at touche@webis.de.

Best regards, CoFE Team @ Touché