CHANGE-IT

CHANGE-IT is a generation task for Italian – more specifically, a style transfer task for headlines of Italian newspapers. CHANGE-IT is the first shared task on generation that would be included in the EVALITA campaign.

One of the reasons why we want to have this task is to stimulate more research on generation within the Italian community. For this reason, we release to the participating teams not only training data, but also a baseline sequence to sequence model that performs the task in order to help everyone get started, even when not accustomed to generation models, yet.

Contextually, this task will help to further explore the irksome issue of evaluation of generated text, which is receiving particular attention in the NLG international community.

THE TASK: The task can be seen as a “headline translation” problem. Given a (collection of) headlines from two newspapers at opposite ends of the political spectrum, namely Il Giornale (G) and La Repubblica (R), change all G-headlines to headlines in style R, and all R-headlines to headlines in style G.