Date: Friday, April 29, 2022
Venue: University of Helsinki, Siltavuorenpenger 1, Psychologicum, hall K170 (and online via zoom and/or gather-town)
Participation: Free of charge but registration is compulsory. Please fill in the online registration form. Registration deadlines: April 22 (for on-site participation) and April 27 (for remote participation)

Invited speakers (in alphabetical order):

Luigi Acerbi, University of Helsinki
Raquel Fernandez, University of Amsterdam
Peter Gärdenfors, Lund University
Markus Heinonen, Aalto University
Riikka Möttönen, University of Helsinki
Ellie Pavlick, Brown University
Barbara Plank, LMU Munich
Okko Räsänen, Tampere University
Martti Vainio, University of Helsinki

The detailed program is just below, check it out!

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are interested in dealing with the inherent ambiguity of natural languages and researchers who work on learning meaning representations from multimodal and multilingual signals to improve language understanding in natural settings. We welcome contributions from the speech processing community, NLP research and people working with computer vision.

Schedule (all times in UTC +3)

9:15 – 9:30: Welcome and introduction
9:30 – 10:15: Peter Gärdenfors: Using conceptual spaces and event representations to construct semantics for artificial systems [slides]
Coffee
10:45 – 11:30: Okko Räsänen: Exploring the role of different modalities in child language development using computational modeling [video][slides]
11:30 – 12:15: Raquel Fernandez: Efficient language production strategies in visually grounded dialogue [video][slides]
Lunch
13:30 – 14:15: Barbara Plank: Perspectives on Human Uncertainty in Annotation for NLP [video][slides ]
14:15 – 14:45: Markus Heinonen: Low-rank Bayesian neural networks [video][slides ]
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14:45 – 15:15: Luigi Acerbi: Probabilistic machine and human intelligence under extreme resource constraints [video][slides ]
Coffee
16:00 – 16:30: Riikka Möttönen: Uncertainty and statistical language learning in adults [video][slides ]
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16:30 – 17:00: Martti Vainio: Sound-action symbolic grounding of meaning in speech [slides][video]
17:00 – 17:45: Ellie Pavlick: Don’t put the ‘cart’ before the [[cart]]: Multimodal pretraining for learning semantic concepts prior to learning language [video][slides ]

Co-located event

There will be another co-located event in language technology that will run just before the UnGroundNLP workshop (April 27-28). The CorCorDial project will run an international workshop on Corpus-Based and Computational Approaches to Linguistic Variation. That workshop is also free of charge and can be followed in place or remotely. Check out their program!

Local Information

Accommodation

Hotel Scandic Kaisaniemi, Hotel Arthur, and GLO Hotel Kluuvi quite close to the premises.
Omena Hotels have two somewhat cheaper hotels in central Helsinki, though a bit further away than the options above.
Eurohostel offer even cheaper accommodation, also within walking distance of the venue.
More options are available at the Visit Helsinki accommodation page.

Arriving by air

The Helsinki-Vantaa Airport is located some 17 km from Helsinki city centre and is easily reachable by train: a 30-40min train ride. The airport is of moderate size and quite efficiently run, but do allow 1-2 hours before departure for check-in and security. On arrival, you can expect to be out of the airport in 30 minutes after landing.

The easiest connection to the city center of Helsinki is by train. You can also look at other options of public transportation (search for the route from Lentoasema, Vantaa to Siltavuorenpenger 1 if you want to go to the University City Campus; the trip should take about half an hour and cost €5.50) or by taxi which takes a similar amount of time and costs about €50. More airport transportation options can be found on the Finnair website.

Local transportation

You can use the journey planner of HSL to find your way along the public transportation system of Helsinki. The department’s central location also allows walking to many destinations in the city.

All public transportation in the Helsinki metropolitan area uses the same ticket system. Single tickets can be purchased with your cell-phone (just download the app) or from ticket machines found on some of the stops.

Single tickets inside Helsinki cost 2,80 € when bought through the mobile app, 2,80 € when bought from a ticket machine. (Due to covid measures, tickets cannot be bought within the vehicles.) The ticket is valid for one hour from purchase and you can transfer freely from one line to another for that time. If you plan on using the public transport extensively, there are also day tickets available for periods of 1–7 days.

Venue and Map

The workshop will be held at Siltavuorenpenger 1, Psychologicum, hall K170. The building is hosted within the Central Campus of University of Helsinki, and is accessible via a 15 minute walk from the Helsinki Main Train Station (Helsingin Päärautieasema). Here you can find a screenshot of how to arrive form the main station:

Local Organisation Team

Acknowledgments

The event is funded by FoTran, an ERC grant from the European Union’s Research Framework Programme, Horizon 2020 and “Uncertainty-Aware Neural Language Models” funded by the Academy of Finland. The workshop is also supported by the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) and its special interest group in language, speech and cognition. Thank you!