Discovery Challenge “Chat Analytics for Twitch” (ChAT)

This Discovery Challenge was part of ECML-PKDD 2020 in Ghent, Belgium (online, due to Covid-19). The task was to estimate a user’s subscription status regarding Twitch channels they are interacting with.

We received 23 registrations, from which four submitted working approaches. Three of these also submitted a descriptive paper about their method. The proceedings of this Discovery Challenge can be found at CEUR-WS.

If you want to cite this Discovery Challenge or its datasets, please use the following BibTeX entry:

@ARTICLE {kobs2020towards,
    author  = "Kobs, Konstantin and Potthast, Martin and Wiegmann, Matti and Zehe, Albin and Stein, Benno and Hotho, Andreas",
    title   = "Towards Predicting the Subscription Status of Twitch.tv Users --- ECML-PKDD ChAT Discovery Challenge 2020",
    journal = "Proceedings of ECML-PKDD 2020 ChAT Discovery Challenge",
    year    = "2020"
}

Introduction

Streaming platforms for e-sports such as Twitch become more and more popular. Users can stream their gameplay while others watch and comment on the stream. It is also possible to donate to a streamer or subscribe to the channel, which cost monthly fees (4.99$, 9.99$, or 24.99$). Half of the money goes to the streamer, the other half to Twitch. Thus, there is a monetary motivation for both, streamers and Twitch, to get people to subscribe to a channel. In this challenge, you will build a binary classifier that predicts the subscription status of a user-channel combination based on the comments the user made in this and other channels. Given a model that predicts a user to be subscribed although he or she is not, we can suspect that the user could be interested in a subscription, which could be used for targeted advertising.

The organizers of this discovery challenge are by no means affiliated with Twitch.

Important Dates

This is the timeline for this challenge. Further information will be announced in the future. All dates are given in the AoE (anywhere on earth) timezone.

• March 21, 2020: Data will be provided ✅
• April 22 - May 13, 2020: Early Bird evaluation phase ✅
• May 19 - June 9, 2020: Final evaluation phase ✅
• June 10, 2020: Final results are notified to participants ✅
• July 1, 2020: Paper submission due ✅
• July 15, 2020: Author notification ✅
• July 31, 2020: Early Bird Conference Registration Deadline ✅
• August 6, 2020: Camera ready submission due ✅
• September 18, 2020, 15:00 CEST: ECML-PKDD Discovery Challenge Session ✅

News

• October 1, 2020: We want to thank all participants for being part of this challenge. We think the different approaches and discussions about them were very interesting and gave multiple ideas for future research. To share this with more people, we made the session recording as well as all presentations available on this website.
• September 9, 2020: The proceedings are now available via CEUR-WS and are already indexed by Google Scholar. Thanks again to all participants. We will see us on Friday, September 18, at the online ECML-PKDD.
• July 15, 2020: We notified the authors about the paper acceptance along with the reviews. Authors are now instructed to register to the conference and prepare the camera-ready papers and presentations.
• July 2, 2020: The paper submission deadline has ended. We will review the papers in the next two weeks and then notify authors about their acceptance.
• June 13, 2020: All results are final now. We now provide the test data on the Results page in order to analyze your model.
• June 10, 2020: The Final Evaluation Phase has ended. We thank all participants for their submissions. You can find the results of the evaluation on the Results page.
• June 2, 2020: We extended the Final Evaluation phase deadline by one week. You now have time until June 9 for your final submission.
• May 6, 2020: We extended the Early Bird Evaluation phase deadline by one week. You now have time until May 13 for your first submission.
• April 16, 2020: We launched the “Submission to TIRA” page to provide more information for the submission procedure. We also added timeranges to the important dates to make the evaluation phases clearer.
• March 24, 2020: We now provide the evaluation script for the challenge, so you can test under the same conditions as in the final evaluation.
• March 21, 2020: We have a better task description and revamped the data’s structure. If you already downloaded the data by now, please download it again and pay attention to the new data format.

Contact

If you have any questions regarding the challenge, please write an email to ecml2020-dc@professor-x.de.

Task Committee

• Konstantin Kobs (Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg)
• Martin Potthast (Leipzig University)
• Matti Wiegmann (Bauhaus Universität Weimar and German Aerospace Center)
• Albin Zehe (Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg)

Advisors

• Andreas Hotho (Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg)
• Benno Stein (Bauhaus Universität Weimar)