NLP Research at the University of Helsinki and Information about the Language Technology Programme
We organise an event on representation learning from multilingual language data (FoTran2018). We have great invited speakers:
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/
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.
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.
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.
Our NLPL project was featured in NordForsk newsletter with a link to this article!
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
Long Paper
Posters
There are several projects that will start during spring 2018. One of them is the ERC-funded project Found in Translation (FoTran). We are currently looking for motivated people with a background in computational linguistics or computer science to join our team. Please, get in touch with us (via e-mail to jorg.tiedemann at helsinki.fi) if you are interested in doing your post-doctoral research or a PhD within the scope of the project!
We are also looking for a university lecturer in language technology. More information about this positions is available from the university’s job opportunity page.
Language technology participates in the EU Horizon 2020 project MeMAD. The project runs 2018-2020 and we had our official kick-off seminar this week on Tuesday, January 16.
A new project will start in our research group with the title “Found in Translation: Natural Language Understanding with Cross-Lingual Grounding“ funded by the ERC. It will focus on representation learning from multilingual data. More information will come soon! Here is an illustration to motivate the idea behind the project:
Timo Honkela’s concept of the peace machine got some more publicity:
The following positions are available in our research group:
The application deadline is November 19, 2017. More information about the positions can be found at the job announcements linked above. We look for talented people to join our team and these exciting projects. Contact Jörg Tiedemann for further details and possible questions.
University of Helsinki