TADA (the Text Analysis Developers' Alliance) announces a new text analysis event: a multi-category "best ideas" type competition intended to stimulate innovation in text analysis and encourage connections between users and developers. There is a prize to be won - and a tight deadline: 30th June 2008.

Competition Categories

Best New Tool
An award for the best Web Service or REST text tool. Consideration will be given to innovation and fulfilling a need in the Digital Humanities community. Though the tools will be judged on their functional and conceptual merits, we expect that authors will be willing to publish their code under an appropriate open source license. Submissions should include a link to the tool, summary documentation about using it, and a short statement about it.

Best Idea for a New Tool
An award for the best idea for a new tool that can be implemented on the web as a Web Service or REST tool. This is similar to the previous category (with emphasis on innovation and responding to a need), but no implementation is required for this category. Submissions should include a fairly detailed description of what the tool would do and how it would function (from the user's perspective); it may also include sketches and/or pseudo code (but neither is required).

Best Idea for Improving a Current Tool
This award will recognize the best idea for improving a tool currently registered in the TAPoR Portal. Submissions should provide a fairly detailed description of a single enhancement – big or small, but feasible – of the tool's interface or functioning, and consideration will be given to creativity and usefulness. Submissions may also include sketches and/or pseudo code (but neither is required).

Best Idea for Improving the Interface of the TAPoR Portal
This award will recognize the best idea for improving the interface of the TAPoR Portal (not any of the tools in particular, but the interface of the Portal itself). Submissions should provide a fairly detailed description of the proposed improvement (including an explanation of why it would be an improvement), and consideration will be given to creativity and usefulness. Submissions may also include sketches, though they are not required.

Best Experiment of Text Analysis Using High Performance Computing
This category is intended to encourage experimentation of text analysis development within a high performance computing (or grid) architecture. Consideration will be given to innovation and future promise of the application or technique. Submissions should include a fairly detailed description of the experiment, the environment in which it was developed, and the corpus used. If applicable, submissions should also include code (with an open source license).

http://tada.mcmaster.ca/trex/