Developing more intelligent search engines is a long-term common goal for both academia and industry. An intelligent search engine should meet either precise or vague requirements from users. Results that are semantically relevant to the queries should be returned, other than those literally matching results.

In particular, the technologies behind modern personal digital assistants and robots demand accurate understandings of requirements and intents from users, and retrieve answers automatically from the web. During the 2015 Baidu World Summit, Baidu has unveiled the new virtual assistant ‘Duer’ (度秘) which will be integrated into its latest mobile search app. The company’s CEO Robin Li pointed out that there will be three core components involved in Duer: integration, indexing and delivery. Here indexing means the indexing of all integrated information and services for providing more intelligent services to users. In other words, we need better ways to model all these information and services. For instance, people may search for “restaurants with good environment suitable for kids’ birthday parties”. In order to meet the user’s intent, the search engine needs to understand every restaurant, check which of them can be tagged as “with good environment” and “suitable for kids’ birthday parties” and index the restaurants with these tags for retrieval.

This year, Baidu Cup 2016 challenges participants to tackle the problem of entity search in the scenario of Duer.

One First Prize, One or Two Second Prizes, and Several Third Prizes.

The Top Prize is RMB 25,000.00!

Mar 4, 2016: Registration opens;

Mar 15, 2016: Competition begins (dataset ready for the public);

June 15, 2016: Competition ends (submission deadline);

July 6, 2016: Winners notified.

◆ Hosts: China Compute Federation(CCF)

◆ Organizer:

◇ Technical Committee on Chinese Information Technology(CCF TCCI)

◇ Baidu Netcom Science and Technology Co.,Ltd

◆ Co-organizer:

◇ Beijing Institute of Big Data Research(BIBDR)

◆ Steering Committee:

◇ Weinan E, Peking University

◇ Haifeng Wang, Baidu

◇ Bing Liu, UIC

◆ Co-Chairs:

◇ Xiaojun Wan, Peking University

◇ Shiqi Zhao, Baidu

◆ Organzing Committee:

◇ Xiaojun Wan, Peking University

◇ Shiqi Zhao, Baidu

◇ Yansong Feng, Peking University

◇ Ke Sun, Baidu

◇ Yajuan Lyu, Baidu