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International Multicultural Name Matching Competition: Design, Execution, Results, and Lessons Learned

This paper describes different aspects of an open competition to evaluate multicultural name matching software, including the contest design, development of the test data, different phases of the competition, behavior of the participating teams, results of the competition, and lessons learned throughout. The competition, known as The MITRE Challengeâ„¢, was informally announced at LREC 2010 and was recently concluded. Contest participants used the competition website (http://mitrechallenge.mitre.org) to download the competition data set and guidelines, upload results, and to view accuracy metrics for each result set submitted. Participants were allowed to submit unlimited result sets, with their top-scoring set determining their overall ranking. The competition website featured a leader board that displayed the top score for each participant, ranked according to the principal contest metric - mean average precision (MAP). MAP and other metrics were calculated in near-real time on a remote server, based on ground truth developed for the competition data set. Additional measures were taken to guard against gaming the competition metric or overfitting to the competition data set. Lessons learned during running this first MITRE Challenge will be valuable to others considering running similar evaluation campaigns.