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Unexpected news events such as earthquakes or natural disasters represent a unique information access problem where traditional approaches fail. For example, immediately after an event, the corpus may be sparsely populated with relevant content. Even when, after a few hours, relevant content is available, it is often inaccurate or highly redundant. At the same time, crisis events demonstrate a scenario where users urgently need information, especially if they are directly affected by the event.

The goal of this track is to develop systems for efficiently monitoring the information associated with an event over time. Specifically, we are interested in developing systems which (1) can broadcast short, relevant, and reliable sentence-length updates about a developing event and (2) can track the value of important event-related attributes (eg number of fatalities). The track has the following goals,