Workshop Details

  • Date: 11 February 2016
  • Place: University of Helsinki, Athena, Siltavuorenpenger 3 A, lecture hall 302
  • Registration: 31 January, 2016, free of charge (including dinner, first-come-first-serve within our budget constraints)

Please use this registration form.

Natural language processing (NLP) has advanced in many respects but still supports a minority of the World’s languages so far. Language technology becomes also increasingly important for empirical research in linguistics and emerging fields such as digital humanities. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers that work on problems that may gain from multilingual resources and those who work on building such resources and tools for processing them. A special focus will be set on the support of low-resource languages and the use of cross-lingual methods in porting tools and linguistic resources to new languages and domains. We invite people in computational linguistics, language typology, translation studies, language documentation to discuss current challenges and to find possibilities for collaborations.

We have three distinguished invited speakers in the program:

The schedule is as follows:

  • 09:30 – 10:00 Coffee and Welcome
  • 10:00 – 11:00 Laurette Pretorius: Language technology in a multilingual environment
  • NLP for low-resource languages
  • 11:00 – 11:20 Jörg Tiedemann / Robert Östling: Cross-Lingual NLP
  • 11:15 – 11:40 Zeljko Agic: If All You Have is a Bit of the Bible
  • 11:40 – 12:05 Roman Yangarber: NLP for endangered languages
  • 12:05 – 12:30 Sjur Moshagen & Jack Rueter: NLP for minority languages
  • 12:30 – 13:30 lunch (at Restaurant Piano, Rauhankatu 15)
  • 13:30 – 14:30 Anders Søgaard: Challenges with low-resource NLP
  • NLP for general linguistics
  • 14:30 – 14:50 Matti Miestamo: Technology in linguistic research
  • 14:50 – 15:10 Östen Dahl: Massively parallel corpora in language typology
  • 15:10 – 15:30 Filip Ginter: Parsebanks for linguists
  • 15:30 – 16:00 coffee
  • 16:00 – 17:00 Joakim NivreTowards a Universal Grammar for Natural Language Processing
  • 17:00 – 18:00 open discussion and conclusions
  • 18:30 dinner (at Kolme Kruunua, Liisankatu 5)

The workshop is kindly supported by BAULT. We are grateful for the financial support.