OnForumS: The Shared Task on Online Forum Summarisation at MultiLing'15

In this paper we present the Online Forum Summarisation (OnForumS) pilot task at MultiLing'15. OnForumS is a pioneering attempt at encompassing automatic summarisation, argumentation mining and sentiment analysis into one shared task and at bringing crowdsourcing to the evaluation of systems for automatic summarisation and argument structure parsing. It covered two languages, English and Italian. Four research groups, each submitting two runs, participated in the task and these complemented with two baseline system runs were evaluated via crowdsourcing. Performance results are presented and briefly discussed. Being the first of its kind, we believe OnForumS'15 was a successful campaign and hope it will establish itself as a valuable exercise in advancing the state-of-the-art in this new emerging area. Current plans are to organise it again jointly with MultiLing in 2017 and to include more languages.