University of Helsinki
Helsinki-NLP received the 2022 Steven Krauwer award for CLARIN achievements for the work on open machine translation for Ukrainian. Thank you very much for this award but especially also thanks to everyone who contributed data, software and help with putting this all together! And let us continue to help people in need recognizing the importance of open and transparent language technology and the responsibilities we have in society. Thank you!
Language (technology) is the key to intelligence and equality
An article about the importance of language technology has been published in “språkbruk” from the Institute for the Languages of Finland. The article discusses that we need to be careful about our language data and that we need to make en effort to develop transparent and open technology to handle valuable information we produce.
Donate spoken language data in Finnish and Swedish
The Language Bank of Finland and the Swedish Literary Society in Finland are collecting Finland-Swedish speech data (https://doneraprat.fi) (see YLE article with video: Vill du att röststyrning ska fungera på finlandssvenska? Kom med och donera prat [Do you want voice control to work in Finland-Swedish? Come and donate speech]). Note that the campaign for collecting spoken Finnish also continues (https://lahjoitapuhetta.fi/).
If you wish to know how the database may affect everyday life and how it can be used in research, listen to the YLE podcast “Second Last Word” (YLE pod: Så här lär sig din dammsugare finlandssvensk dialekt [How your vacuum cleaner learns Finnish-Swedish dialect] and YLE article: Pratande kylskåp och smarta glasögon hjälper dig handla mat – det här är den röststyrda framtiden [Talking refrigerators and smart glasses help you buy food – this is the voice-controlled future]).
In memory of Timo Honkela
In memory of our friend and colleague Timo Honkela who passed away last week we would like to upload these two links once again about his concept of the peace machine:
May he rest in peace and his spirit inspire us also in the future.
Public PhD defence on May, 28: Tommi Jauhiainen
Tommi Jouhiainen is defending his PhD thesis in language technology on “Language Identification in Texts” on Tuesday, May, 28 at 12 in auditorio XII in the main building of the university. The thesis is available at http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-51-5131-5 and the opponent is Nikola Ljubešić from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana and the University of Zagreb.
Language Technology group visible at DHN 2018
Helsinki Language Technology group had 5 papers in the recent Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (DHN 2018) Conference held on 7–9 March 2018 in Helsinki.
Distinguished Short Paper
- Jörg Tiedemann: Emerging Language Spaces Learned From Massively Multilingual Corpora [pdf]
Long Paper
- Emily Öhman, Kaisla Kajava: Sentimentator: Gamifying Fine-grained Sentiment Annotation [pdf]
Posters
- Yves Scherrer, Tanja Samardžić: ArchiMob: A multidialectal corpus of Swiss German oral history interviews [pdf]
- Seppo Nyrkkö: An approach to unsupervised ontology term tagging of dependency-parsed text using a Self-Organizing Map (SOM) [pdf]
- Mika Hämäläinen, Tanja Säily, Eetu Mäkelä: Normalizing Early English Letters for Neologism Retrieval [pdf]
The Peace Machine on Al Jazeera
More publicity for Timo Honkela’s project, now at Al Jazeera:
See also the interview on Finnish TV tonight (June 1, 2017)
Open positions for postdoctoral researchers in Digital Humanities
The Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, invites applications for three (3) postdoctoral researchers in Digital Humanities. We are looking for candidates with expertise on computational science, linguistics and history/cultural heritage. The successful candidates will become part of a multidisciplinary research group with the main aim in applying a big data approach to large historical metadata and full-text collections. The group is particularly interested in studying conceptual change, intertextuality based on text-reuse and statistical analysis of knowledge production.
Interested candidates are requested to acquaint themselves with the position description:
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/open-positions/three-3-postdoctoral-researchers-digital-humanities Application period ends July 9, 2017.
Best Student Paper at NoDaLiDa2017
Senka Dobrac and Pekka Kauppinen won the prize for the best student paper together with their supervisor Krister Lindén at NoDaLiDa2017 for the paper: OCR and post-correction of historical Finnish texts
Congratulations!
7 tenure track positions at HELDIG and more …
There are seven open tenure track professor positions related to
Helsinki’s Center for Digital Humanities (HELDIG)
Tenure track positions (deadline: February 15):
computer-science-pertaining-to-algorithmic-data-science-with-focus-on-ssh-applications
russian-big-data-methodology
digital-learning-at-work
big-data-learning-analytics
digital-humanities
law-and-digitalization
digital-learning-at-schools
Professor in English Language and Digital Humanities (deadline: February 27)
There are also 5-10 PostDoc positions in the UH Humanities Programme:
(deadline: February, 20) Note that language technology is part of humanities in Helsinki!
Furthermore the position of the HELDIG Research Coordinator (1.3.2017–31.12.2020)
General information about open positions at the University of Helsinki
