Shared tasks are increasingly common in
our field, and new challenges are suggested at almost every conference and
workshop. However, as this has become
an established way of pushing research
forward, it is important to discuss how
we researchers organise and participate in
shared tasks, and make that information
available to the community to allow further research improvements. In this paper, we present a number of ethical issues
along with other areas of concern that are
related to the competitive nature of shared
tasks. As such issues could potentially
impact on research ethics in the Natural
Language Processing community, we also
propose the development of a framework
for the organisation of and participation in
shared tasks that can help mitigate against
these issues arising.