Abstract: The paper describes the CAp 2017 challenge. The challenge concerns the problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) for tweets written in French. We first present the data preparation steps we followed for constructing the dataset released in the framework of the challenge. We begin by demonstrating why NER for tweets is a challenging problem especially when the number of entities increases. We detail the annotation process and the necessary decisions we made. We provide statistics on the inter-annotator agreement, and we conclude the data description part with examples and statistics for the data. We, then, describe the participation in the challenge, where 8 teams participated, with a focus on the methods employed by the challenge participants and the scores achieved in terms of F$_1$ measure. Importantly, the constructed dataset comprising $\sim$6,000 tweets annotated for 13 types of entities, which to the best of our knowledge is the first such dataset in French, is publicly available at \url{http://cap2017.imag.fr/competition.html} .

Introduction: The proliferation of the online social media has lately resulted in the democratization of online content sharing. Among other media, Twitter is very popular for research and application purposes due to its scale, representativeness and ease of public access to its content. However, tweets, that are short messages of up to 140 characters, pose several challenges to traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems due to the creative use of characters and punctuation symbols, abbreviations ans slung language. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental step for most of the information extraction pipelines. Importantly, the terse and difficult text style of tweets presents serious challenges to NER systems, which are usually trained using more formal text sources such as newswire articles or Wikipedia entries that follow particular morpho-syntactic rules. As a result, off-the-self tools trained on such data perform poorly BIBREF0 . The problem becomes more intense as the number of entities to be identified increases, moving from the traditional setting of very few entities (persons, organization, time, location) to problems with more. Furthermore, most of the resources (e.g., software tools) and benchmarks for NER are for text written in English. As the multilingual content online increases, and English may not be anymore the lingua franca of the Web. Therefore, having resources and benchmarks in other languages is crucial for enabling information access worldwide. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark for the problem of NER for tweets written in French. The tweets were collected using the publicly available Twitter API and annotated with 13 types of entities. The annotators were native speakers of French and had previous experience in the task of NER. Overall, the generated datasets consists of INLINEFORM0 tweets, split in training and test parts. The paper is organized in two parts. In the first, we discuss the data preparation steps (collection, annotation) and we describe the proposed dataset. The dataset was first released in the framework of the CAp 2017 challenge, where 8 systems participated. Following, the second part of the paper presents an overview of baseline systems and the approaches employed by the systems that participated. We conclude with a discussion of the performance of Twitter NER systems and remarks for future work.

Question: What method did the highest scoring team use?
Answer: CRF model that used morphosyntactic and distributional features, as well as word clusters based on these learned representations.