Events

MOOMIN 2024

As the final FoTran supported event, we will run the First Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN), to be held at EACL 2024 in Malta on March 21st. We are happy to welcome two great keynote speakers:

We will have a full day of presentations and discussions related to various aspects of modularization in connection with multilinguality and NLP.

Public Examination, PhD thesis by Aarne Talman (2024)

Another FoTran team member, Aarne Talman successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled “Towards Natural Language Understanding: Developing and Assessing Approaches and Benchmarks”. The following press release provides some background on the thesis.

The public examination took place on 23 February 2024  with Professor Vered Shwartz from the University of British Columbia as the opponent. The dissertation is available as part of the series Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis (http://hdl.handle.net/10138/568130)

Found in Translation 2024: Goodbye FoTran

The closing symposium of the FoTran project took place on February 22, 2024. We organized a get-together with former and current members of the team and a keynote by Vered Shwartz from the University of British Columbia, who is also acting as the external examiner during the public defense of Aarne Talman’s PhD thesis coming out of the FoTran project. Furthermore, we welcomed former FoTran team members Alessandro Raganato and Marianna Apidianaki as invited speakers at our workshop and the closing poster session showcased a great selection of achievements from the project.

Public Examination, PhD thesis by Raúl Vázquez (2023)

Our FoTran team member Raúl Vázquez defended the doctoral dissertation entitled “Representation Learning in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation”

The public examination took place in the Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, on 17 November 2023 at 10:00 in the lecture hall at Unioninkatu 33, (room 303). Senior Researcher Dr. Cristina España i Bonet, DFKI, served as the opponent, and Jörg Tiedemann as the custos.

The dissertation will be published in the series Dissertationes Universitatis Helsingiensis (http://hdl.handle.net/10138/566538)

 

UnGroundNLP 2022

Together with the project “Uncertainty-Aware Neural Language Models” we organized  a joint workshop on Uncertainty and Grounding in Language and Translation Modelling. The workshop was also supported by the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) and its special interest group in language, speech and cognition.  We brought 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. A great program with a mix of local and international speakers was compiled and we welcomed a large number of participants on-site and remotely connected. Our external guest speakers included

NLULG 2020 (canceled)

In April 2020, we planned an international workshop on Natural Language Understanding and Language Grounding with keynotes by Lucia Specia, from Imperial College / London,  Raquel Fernández from the University of Amsterdam, Ákos Kádár from Samsung AI / Toronto and  Grzegorz Chrupała from Tilburg University. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the event due to covid-19 and postponed it until further notice. Finally, after the end of the pandemic, we could organize UnGroundNLP 2022 as a replacement of the original workshop.

FoTran Development Day in Tallinn

 

On October 17, 2019 the FoTran team went on a one-day trip to Tallinn to discuss research ideas and plans for the coming period of the project. Part of the trip was also devoted to team building. We also met our colleagues from Tartu NLP led by Mark Fishel and NLP researchers from Tallinn from the Laboratory of Language Technology.

MT Marathon in Prague 2018

Members of the FoTran team participated in the MT Marathon in Prague with a project on implementing the attention bridge architecture for multilingual neural machine translation. This architecture has been the basis of extensive studies in FoTran later on.

FoTran 2018: Found in Translation

The project started with a kickoff workshop on September 28, 2018. It was a great event featuring renowned international experts in NLP providing keynotes at the workshop:

The event was a great success with over 70 participants and fantastic start of the project.