The 27^th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

August 24, 2027 to August 27, 2027
Mount Royal University, Calgary, AB, Canada

Call for Competition Proposals

Help DocEng bring new and exciting challenges to the document engineering community by proposing a competition!

1. Announcement and Deadlines

The competition must be announced no later than \, with a clear description of the task, data, and evaluation procedure.
The competition organisers must submit a four-page report by \, to allow sufficient time for review before the conference.
The competition report will be reviewed by the competition sub-committee for clarity, correctness, and fairness by the competition committee before final results are announced.
The competition report must list all contributors; plagiarism or uncredited use of existing work is strictly prohibited.
At least one of the competition organisers must be present at the conference to present the results of the competition.

2. Data and Resources

The dataset(s) used for the competition shall be made available on the DocEng conference website (or linked from it) by the announcement date.
If additional resources (e.g., code libraries, sample evaluation scripts) are required, these must also be made available to all competitors.

3. Evaluation Metrics

The metrics to be used for evaluation must be clearly stated in the competition description.
Competitors must be able to verify their own scores using the provided metrics or, where possible, evaluation scripts. The competitor proposers may retain a hold-back test set: however, sufficient validation data and tools must be provided to enable independent score verification by competitors.
If multiple test scores are combined, the relative weight of each score toward the final score must be explicitly indicated.
In the case of a tie, the organizers may consider secondary metrics (e.g., runtime, memory usage, novelty) as tiebreakers, to be specified in advance.

4. Fairness and Transparency

There must be a clear determination of the winner based on the published metrics.
Reports may compare submitted results against existing, well-established algorithms for benchmarking.
If previous competition submissions are to be reused for comparison, the respective teams must be informed in advance.
The competition organisers must ensure that all participants have equal access to the data, resources, and evaluation procedures.
The competition organisers must provide sufficient details (and code, where possible) to allow verification of results.

5. Recognition and Rewards

The winner will be awarded one registration pass to the conference.
The winning team will be invited to present their work as a demonstration at the conference.