Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science .

Frequently Asked Questions



  1. Who can participate in the contest?
    The contest is open to everyone. However, opportunities at Amazon may not be available to participants who are not students.

  2. What programming languages can be used?
    Any programming language of your choice can be used.

  3. For the test cases will we be given only twitter IDs or twitter texts as well?
    You will be provided only the Tweet IDs and User IDs. The UserIDs is used only for the purpose of downloading the tweettexts by the provided script.

  4. Can you suggest some links for learning Machine learning? It will be very helpful.
    Please visit the Getting Started page on the event website.

  5. Do I need to come to IISc to participate in the contest?
    No, this is an online event; you only need to register online.

  6. Can a team have more than two members?
    No, only teams of two members are allowed for the contest.

  7. Can we use codes that are available online?
    Yes, you can use any resource that is publicly available.

  8. Can we use training data from an external source in addition to the one provided?
    No, to ensure fairness, this is STRICTLY DISALLOWED.

  9. Can we use algorithms already published in papers?
    Yes, you can use algorithms published in papers.

  10. The validation data is very noisy. We are afraid that the validation of our learnt model will not be very good.
    It is true that the validation data is noisy. We have identified and filtered out the noisy tweets on our side. When you submit your predictions on the validation set we will evaluate it only on the non-noisy tweets. So don't worry!

  11. Can we use GUI-based tools like Weka, RapidMiner etc? If so, how can we submit the code?
    You can of course use these tools. In that case you will not be able to submit the code obviously, but you should write in your report the sequence of steps you took on the GUI to arrive at your result.

  12. Can we use tools for part-of-speech tagging, sentiment analysis etc?
    You can use any tool you want. However these should be documented properly when you send us a report on your approach.

  13. Will we get a confirmation after registering for the event?
    Yes, you will get a confirmation mail (to the primary email ID you provided during registration) within 24 hours of registering for the event. If this does not, you might have made a mistake while entering your primary email ID in the registration form - in any case, do revert back to us.

  14. Can we use information other than the tweet text and the label while learning a model?
    You can use external data sources in the training phase (while learning a model); for example, you can use a publicly available list of stop words or an external data source to create features that might be useful for this task. However, YOU HAVE TO MAKE PREDICTIONS ON THE TEST DATA USING ONLY THE LEARNT MODEL; YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE AN EXTERNAL MEANS OF MAKING PREDICTIONS ON THE VALIDATION / TEST SET SUCH AS CRAWLING THE WEB.

  15. Can we use tweet ids / user ids while learning a model / making predictions on the validation / test set?
    While you are allowed to use hash tags that may occur within the tweet text, you are NOT ALLOWED to use the user id / tweet id while learning a model or making predictions on the validation / test set. Remember that the challenge here is to classify a tweet using the limited content of the tweet text.

  16. Can we use hash tags for learning a classifier?
    You are allowed to use '#' tags that may occur 'within the tweet text' for learning model or making predictions.

  17. Can we crawl the links in the tweets?
    No. You are not allowed to crawl the links in the tweets.

  18. Are we allowed to use a publicly available list of stop words?
    Yes, but do document this in the report that you would send us at the end.

  19. What do the scores in the leaderboard tell us?
    The leaderboard contains the best validation set accuracy (fraction of validation tweets classified correctly) attained by each team (sorted in descending order).

  20. I am unable to log in to the submission portal. What should I do?
    Once you receive a confirmation mail after registering for the contest, you can use your team name (or primary email ID) to log in to the submission portal (use the 'forgot password' option to set your password). You might face problems while logging in if you are using the Google Chrome web browser. Try using Mozzilla Firefox - in case the problem still persists, do send us a mail.

  21. Will we get a participation certificate?
    Yes, provided you submit the final predictions on the test data along with your code and writeup on your approach.