FoTran 2018: Found in translation

The first workshop on representation learning from multilingual data

Invited keynotes by:

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers that are interested in learning meaning representations from natural languages using multilingual data sets. The main focus is on the use of translations as “semantic mirrors”, allowing to infer meaning from translational grounding. With this, FoTran 2018 also constitutes the start of an ERC project with the same name and we hope that this event will set up a growing network that we will make use of during the project. Topics of special interest of this kickoff-event are not restricted to the objectives of the ERC project but include:

  • sentence representation learning in general
  • multilingual neural machine translation
  • cross-lingual NLP and transfer models
  • approaches to natural language inference
  • interpretation and analyses of neural networks used for NLP

As mentioned above, participation is free but requires registration (space limits may apply). There is also a pre-workshop dinner on Thursday evening for people who signed up for that event. This dinner will start at 7pm at Bryggeri Helsinki (Sofiankatu 2). Here is a link for directions.

Tentative Program

09:15 Coffee & Welcome

10:20 coffee

12:00 Lunch (catering in front of the lecture hall)

15:20 Coffee

Closing dinner at Coconut Street (Mariankatu 23) starting at 19:30. Here is a map for directions.

Local Information

Accommodation

Arriving by air

The Helsinki-Vantaa Airport is located some 17 km from Helsinki city centre and is easily reachable by train. 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 20 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 Unioninkatu 40 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. The schedule for the Finnair city bus is available here.

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 2,20 € when bought through the mobile app, 2,50 € when bought from a ticket machine and 3 € when bought from the bus driver (no tickets can be purchased in trams or trains). 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.

 

Local Organisation Team

Contact

Acknowledgments

The event is funded by FoTran, an ERC grant from the European Union’s Research Framework Programme, Horizon 2020. The workshop is also supported by the Faculty of Arts in Helsinki. Thank you!

Map