Call for Participation

LT4CPR Shared Task on Automatic Situation Report Generation

We invite researchers, students, practitioners, humanitarian organizations, and industry teams to participate in the LT4CPR Shared Task on Automatic Situation Report (Sitrep) Generation, organized as part of the First Workshop on Language Technologies for Crisis Preparedness and Response (LT4CPR) at AACL-IJCNLP 2026, on November 9, in Hengqin, Zhuhai, China.

During a crisis, responders must rapidly synthesize large volumes of fragmented, repetitive, uncertain, and sometimes conflicting information. Social media can provide timely reports about hazards, impacts, infrastructure damage, affected populations, urgent needs, and response activities, but turning these messages into an operationally useful overview remains labor-intensive. This shared task explores how language technologies can support the generation of concise, structured, and verifiable situation reports from crisis-related social media streams.

Task Overview

Participating systems will receive a collection of crisis-related social media messages and generate a situation report that summarizes the most important information contained in the collection.

• Input: a set of crisis-related social media messages.
• Output: a structured situation report following the official task template and output format.
• Goal: produce a report that is informative, concise, well organized, faithful to the source messages, and useful for situational awareness.

Reports may cover information such as the crisis context, major events, affected people and locations, casualties, displacement, infrastructure and service disruptions, emerging needs, response activities, resource provision, and unresolved or uncertain claims. The final schema and required sections will be specified in the task guidelines.

No prior participation in LT4CPR is required, and interdisciplinary teams are especially encouraged.

Participation Tracks

The official tracks, eligibility rules, and resource restrictions will be defined in the shared task rules.

Data and Resources

Shared-task data, documentation, evaluation resources, and submission links will be released in stages according to the following tentative schedule.

August 1, 2026 August 7, 2026: Initial Data Release

• Training data
• A complete sample package containing sample input and output, and a sample gold-standard report
• Detailed documentation of the required input and output formats
• A situation-report template and machine-readable output schema
• Annotation and data documentation

August 1 August 7–September 1, 2026: Evaluation and Development Resources

• Baseline code and example system outputs, where available
• Evaluation metric scripts, definitions and evaluation documentation
• Validation scripts for checking submission format

September 1, 2026: Test and Submission Release

The final release before system submission will include:

• Test data
• A submission platform for system outputs
• A submission platform for shared-task system papers
• Leaderboard information, if applicable

All release dates and resource details are tentative and may be updated. Participants should consult this page regularly for the latest information.

Evaluation

Systems will be evaluated using a combination of automatic metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, BERTScore etc., across different levels (document level and system level). Before the evaluation phase, the organizers will publish the metric definitions, explain how each score is calculated, and release the official evaluation code when it is available. The final ranking criteria and tie-breaking procedures will also be documented. Evaluation may consider:

How to Participate

1. Register your team using the official registration form.
2. Review the task guidelines, data license, and participation rules.
3. Download the released data and baseline resources.
4. Develop and evaluate your system using the training and development sets.
5. Submit system outputs for the official test set through the designated platform.
6. Submit a system description paper if required for inclusion in the shared task proceedings and workshop program.

Participation in the shared task does not require a separate submission to the workshop's general Call for Papers. Shared task system papers will follow their own submission instructions and deadlines.

System Description Papers

Participating teams will be invited to submit a system description paper explaining their approach, resources, experiments, results, error analysis, limitations, and ethical considerations. Papers should clearly disclose the models, external data, APIs, retrieval sources, and manual interventions used by the system.

• Submission format: ACL style; page limit and submission link TBA.
• Presentation: accepted system papers may be presented as posters or sessions at the LT4CPR workshop.
• Proceedings: publication details will be announced with the system-paper call.

Participation Rules

• Each team must designate a primary contact and use a consistent team name across registration and submissions.
• Participants must comply with the dataset license and may not redistribute restricted task data.
• All external data, pretrained models, APIs, prompts, and human involvement must be documented.
• Submitted outputs must be produced by the registered system by the submission deadline.
• Teams must follow the submission limits and resource restrictions of their selected track.
• The organizers reserve the right to inspect submissions for rule compliance and to exclude invalid entries.

Ethics and Responsible Use

Crisis-related social media can contain sensitive personal information, distressing content, rumors, and references to vulnerable populations. Participants must use the data only for the purposes allowed by the dataset license and should avoid attempts to identify, contact, or profile individuals represented in the data. Teams should discuss privacy, representational harms, hallucination risks, model limitations, and the risks of deploying automated reports in high-stakes environments.

Shared-task outputs are research artifacts and must not be treated as verified operational intelligence or used as a substitute for expert review and established emergency-management procedures.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth (AoE), unless otherwise stated. Dates are tentative and may be updated.

Updates and Contact

Updates will be posted on this page and through the LT4CPR communication channels. Questions about the shared task may be sent to lt4cpr.sharedtask@gmail.com.

To help the organizers estimate participation, prospective teams are encouraged to register their interest as soon as the registration form becomes available.