ICDAR 2025 CoLiE

ICDAR 2025 Competition on Automatic Classification of Literary Epochs

held in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, to be held the September 17-21, 2025 - Wuhan, Hubei, China

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Overview

The ICDAR 2025 Competition on Automatic Classification of Literary Epochs (CoLiE) aims to advance the field of temporal text analysis by challenging participants to develop automated methods for dating literary texts, that is, automatically predicting the time in which the text was written.

This competition presents two main tasks: Task 1, Literary Epochs Classification and Task 2, ChronoText Classification. Each participant can participate in both or only one of them.

To join the competition, click the "Join Competition" in top right corner of the Kaggle page for the task. In addition, please fill in the registration form.

We believe this shared task will help advance the field of information retrieval and natural language processing and contribute to a deeper understanding of literary history.

This competition is open to anyone passionate about information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. Whether you are a seasoned expert or a newcomer to the field, we welcome you to participate and extend the boundaries of automated text analysis!

Tasks

Task 1: Literary Text Dating

This task focuses on automatically dating literary texts through two complementary sub-tasks:

Sub-task 1.1: Literary Epochs Classification

Classification of texts into six literary epochs:

  • Classicism (1660-1798)
  • Romanticism (1798-1837)
  • Victorian Literature (1837-1901)
  • Modernism (1900-1945)
  • Postmodernism (1945-2000)
  • Contemporary (from 2000)

Sub-task 1.2: Period Classification

Texts are classified into three epoch periods: early (first quarter of the epoch), middle (middle half), and late (final quarter). These periods differ in length between epochs. The Contemporary epoch is divided into only two periods.

Task 2: ChronoText Classification

This task focuses on temporal classification at different granularity levels through two complementary sub-tasks:

Sub-task 2.1: Century Classification

Classification of texts into their century of origin:

  • 17th Century
  • 18th Century
  • 19th Century
  • 20th Century
  • 21st Century

Sub-task 2.2: Decade Classification

For each text, participants must identify the specific decade within the century when the text was written.

Competition Timeline

  • December 17, 2024
    Competition Launch & Training Data Release
  • April 1, 2025
    Test Dataset Release
  • April 8, 2025
    Submission Deadline
  • May 1, 2025
    Competition Reports Due
  • May 16, 2025
    Camera-ready Paper Due
  • September 17-21, 2025
    Results Presentation at ICDAR

Organization

Organizing Committee

  • Marina Litvak (Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel)
  • Irina Rabaev (Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel)
  • Ricardo Campos (University of Beira Interior and INESC TEC, Portugal)
  • Alípio Jorge (University of Porto and INESC TEC, Portugal)
  • Adam Jatowt (University of Innsbruck, Austria)
  • Roza Bass (Shamoon College of Engineering, Israel)
  • Hugo Sousa (University of Porto and INESC TEC, Portugal)

Attending


ICDAR 2025 ColiE Competition is held in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Document Analysis