FoTran2018

We organise an event on representation learning from multilingual language data (FoTran2018). We have great invited speakers:

  • Kyunghyun Cho, NYU, New York
  • Manaal Faruqui, Google
  • André Martins, Unbabel, Lisbon
  • Ivan Vulić, University of Cambridge
  • Željko Agić, IT University of Copenhagen

Sign up if you want to participate or even present your work! Participation is free but registration is required. More info here: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/language-technology/fotran-2018/

Found in Translation project presentation at Charles University’s Fred Jelinek Seminar Series

Professor Jörg Tiedemann gave a talk at the Charles University in Czech Republic on the 18th June as part of their Fred Jelinek Seminar Series.

Abstract:

Found in Translation – Learning to understand languages with cross-lingual grounding

Translated texts are semantic mirrors of the original text and the significant variations that we can observe across languages can be used to disambiguate the meaning of a given expression using the linguistic signal that is grounded in translation. We are interested in massively parallel corpora consisting of hundreds up to a thousand different languages and how they can be applied as implicit supervision to learn abstractions that could lead to significant improvements in natural language understanding. As a side-effect, we can also see how multilingual models can pick up essential relationships between languages building a continuous space with reasonable language clusters. I will talk about some initial results and plans for the future and I would like to get your feedback about those ideas.

NLUxG project presentation at the Academy of Finland AIPSE seminar

The Academy of Finland funded research project Natural Language Understanding with Cross-Lingual Grounding was presented in the Academy of Finland opening seminar Novel Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Physical Sciences and Engineering Research (AIPSE) on 18 June by Dr. Alessandro Raganato and Dr. Hande Celikkanat.

Our presentation and the poster attracted a lot of interest from the seminar participants.