University of Helsinki
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.
Detect, normalize and generate Finnish dialects
Finnish dialects create a lot of trouble when interacting with computers, since it is impossible to speak a language without speaking in a dialect of some sort. Mika Hämäläinen, Niko Partanen, Khalid Alnajjar and Jack Rueter from our language technology team have created software that can automatically detect, normalize and generate Finnish dialects. Their research made it to the news on our university website.
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]).
Meet the LT industry 2021
- Place: Metsätalo (Unioninkatu 40), Sali I
- Date: Friday November 26, 2021
- Time: 15:15 – 17:45
Update 26 November: Thanks for attending! You can find the presentation slides here (UH account required).
The purpose of this event is to arrange a meeting between students and representatives of the industry that work with language technology in one way or another. The event is open to anyone who is interested in getting information about career opportunities. We will have short presentations of relevant companies and their business and leave time for questions and discussions. There will also be the opportunity to informally speak to the industry representatives face to face.
We have invited various language service providers and LT businesses and the preliminary list of confirmed participants is listed below:
- Kielikone (unmanned booth)
- Lingsoft
- Semantix
- Silo.AI (virtual participation)
- Speechly
- Utopia Analytics
Please sign up here by Friday 19 November if you intend to participate. (The registration is not binding, it is just to facilitate the organization.)
Publicity about OPUS-CAT
Yuri Balashov, professor of philosophy at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Georgia, published a review article about OPUS-CAT at the ATA Chronicle:
OPUS-CAT: A State-of-the-Art Neural Machine Translation Engine on Your Local Computer
22 open positions at FCAI
Are you an ambitious researcher looking for an interesting postdoc, research fellow or PhD position?
The Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI offers a possibility for 22 new researchers to join a unique research community with an attractive joint mission. Especially interesting for NLP researchers: Topic 11: Interactive AI using multimodal communication
FCAI welcomes applicants with diverse backgrounds, and qualified female candidates are explicitly encouraged to apply. The deadline for applications is October 5, 2020 (midnight UTC+02:00). Read more and apply here: https://fcai.fi/we-are-hiring
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.
HelsinkiNLP in huggingface
Our NMT models from OPUS-MT are in the news as they are now ported and integra
ted in the popular huggingface transformer library. Here is also a colab notebook for playing around with a the English-to-Romance-languages model.
Over 1,000 pre-trained models are now available from the library! Here some more information about the use of bilingual models and multilingual models.
FoTran @ AI Day 2019
Alessandro presents FoTran during the Poster session of the AI Day 2019 organised by FCAI. And a presentation about the FCAI special interest group for language speech and cognition was also part of the programme. Here is a another summary of the event.
Two Presentations at HELDIG Summit
There were two presentations from our group at HELDIG Summit, one about FoTran and one about the new Special Interest Group on Language, Speech and Cognition under the umbrella of FCAI.
