Language Processing Center North
The ACL 2022 conference took place May 22-27 at the Convention Centre Dublin, and we are happy to say that LPCN was represented in the form of its members Johanna Björklund, Frank Drewes and Anna Jonsson who were invited to present their paper Improved N-Best Extraction with an Evaluation on Language Data.
Below follows the 12 min long presentation video that was made in preparation for the conference.
On April 28, Hannah Devinney presented a talk on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing at AI Sweden’s Swedish NLP Webinar series, which focuses on NLP development in Sweden and/or about the Swedish language.
The talk focuses on gendered aspects of “bias”: exploring what it is, how it manifests in NLP, the harms it causes, and what we as NLPers can do to combat these harms. Their presentation was followed by an engaging discussion on the nature and future of “unbiased” NLP. We hope that this talk will lead to increased awareness in the AI community of the importance of intersectional and inclusive models of gender for mitigating bias.
A recording of the talk can be found in the video embedded below.
AI-driven advertising is often presented as one of the main successes of deep learning, after heavy investments in machine learning algorithms that discover and exploit patterns in consumer behaviour. In a new project financed the Marcus and Marianne Wallenberg Foundation, researchers from Umeå University, Malmö University, Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Gothenburg collaborate to understand the implications for citizens and society linked to different types of targeting methods used in online advertising.
In December 2020, WASP launched a new research arena to place Media AI at the centre of a multidisciplinary ecosystem of scientific fields and industry segments. The arena is a recognition of the value of media AI in process automation, for example, in the facilitation of remote control in forestry, in the creation of virtual verification environments for autonomous machinery and in the generation of non-playable characters in gaming.
In the afternoon of March 20, a number of LPCN members had a workshop together with Humlab on the topic of text analysis. We all presented how we use or plan to use text analysis in our work. Happily, we managed to identify a number of immediate collaboration opportunities and also discussed the possibilities for building a joint text analysis infrastructure. As an additional benefit, the LPCN family grew substantially! The workshop concluded with a very nice after work session.
LPCN members Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari also participated and presented at ‘Robots for Assisted Living Workshop’ in IROS-2018. Maitreyee’s research focuses on building and implementing hybrid (machine learning and formal grammars) dialogue models for communication between robots and humans, While Michele builds deep learning based models for intention recognition from natural language. They presented their on-going research to one of the workshops and below are glimpses of the same.
PhD students Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari recently participated in the organization of The 1st PhD International Conference on Safe and Social Robotics (SSR-2018) http://www.socrates-project.eu/sesoro-2018/ in Madrid Spain. The conference was a collaboration between two H2020 Projects SECURE and SOCRATES.
Three LPCN members gave much appreciated presentations of their work on the 9th International Workshop Weighted Automata: Theory and Applications (WATA 2018) which was held in Leipzig (Germany), May 22–26:
LPCN members Michele Persiani and Maitreyee Tewari present their work at the 2nd SOCRATES workshop in Israel.
Suna Bensch (LPCN) and Henning Bordihn edited a special issue in the Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics, dedicated to Professor Helmut Jürgensen on the occasion of his 75th birthday and in appreciation of his scientific work and his impact as teacher, mentor, and person. Among the sixteen papers in this special issue is the paper “The Output Size Problem for String-to-Tree Transducers” by Martin Berglund (LPCN), Frank Drewes (LPCN) and Brink van der Merwe.