The European project EFA 227/16/LINGUATEC “Development of cross-border cooperation and knowledge transfer in language technologies” organizes the workshop open to all researchers, with the aim of disseminating the work carried out within the project and presenting some of the advances made for Basque and Occitan. This project is co-financed by the European Regional [...]]]>

The European project EFA 227/16/LINGUATEC “Development of cross-border cooperation and knowledge transfer in language technologies” organizes the workshop open to all researchers, with the aim of disseminating the work carried out within the project and presenting some of the advances made for Basque and Occitan.
This project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

Free registration. Please, use this registration form

Eneko Agirre won again a Google prize last March. He is one of the few researchers who has obtained the Google Faculty Research Award on three occasions. The $62,000 prize will fund the project ‘Conversational Question Answering agents that learn after deployment’ to develop user dialogue systems, chatbots and artificial intelligence.

After finishing our Erasmus Mundus LCT Master in 2016 Michael Ustaszewski is now a postdoc assistant at the University of Innsbruck, and Unit Manager (liaison with the Department of Translation Studies) at the Innsbruck Translation Centre. His group is working on Corpus-Based Translation and asked us to publish this Call for PhD Position Candidates:

The Department of Translation Studies at the University of Innsbruck invites applications for a PhD position in the framework of the two-year research project “TransBank: A Meta-Corpus for Translation Research” funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The goal of the project is to build a large, open and expandable bank of translated texts and their original texts. Its main innovative feature is the ability to exploit a rich set of metadata labels characterising each text and text pair for the compilation and download of sub-corpora, tailored to the requirements of specific translation-related research questions.

The PhD student will be involved in all stages of the corpus building process, thus having the opportunity to gather translation data relevant to his/her specific research interest. The student will work autonomously on the development of the metadata labelset and on collecting translation data, on the basis of which he or she will conduct quantitative and/or qualitative analyses for his/her thesis. Work will be carried out in close collaboration with the project’s two principal investigators and two MA students.

The following requirements are looked for in the successful candidate:

• Master’s degree in Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics,
• Computational Linguistics or a related field
• proven familiarity with translation theory
• strong interest in data-driven research methodologies and linguistic annotation
• excellent teamwork skills
• proficiency in English on a level suitable for written and spoken scientific communication
• solid programming skills in a scripting language (e.g. Python) will be an asset, as will knowledge of German or any other language(s)

The two-year position with a weekly working time of 20 hours (50%) commences in September 2017 and offers an annual stipend of € 19,117 plus allowances for conference attendance. The position involves enrolment in the PhD programme in Linguistics and Media Studies at the University of Innsbruck.

Applications should include:

1. A cover letter (1 page maximum) that relates the candidate’s  experience and interest in the TransBank project
2. A two-page thesis proposal describing the research question and methodology underlying the candidate’s envisaged analyses using TransBank data
3. A CV listing any publications
4. Copies of relevant diplomas and certificates
5. A recommendation letter by the candidate’s MA thesis supervisor or a university professor
6. A copy of the MA thesis or the latest draft

To apply, please submit the documents in two PDF files (one containing documents 1 to 5, one containing document 6) by 10 April 2017 via the upload form at http://transbank.info/jobs

Shortlisted applicants will be interviewed in person or via Skype towards the end of April.

Further information:

Details on the research project can be found on the project website http:/www.transbank.info
For enquiries about the position and the application process, please contact mail[at]transbank.info
Information about the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Innsbruck: http://translation.uibk.ac.at
For information on the PhD programme in Linguistics and Media Studies at the University of Innsbruck and the enrolment process, please refer to
https://www.uibk.ac.at/studium/angebot/phd-sprach-und-medienwissenschaft/index.html.en

Eneko Agirre has been awarded with a Google Research Award after its annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics, including machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational neuroscience. Google received 950 proposals covering 55 countries and over 350 universities, and decided to [...]]]>

Measuring the distance between word meanings

Eneko Agirre has been awarded with a Google Research Award after its annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics, including machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational neuroscience. Google received 950 proposals covering 55 countries and over 350 universities, and  decided to fund 151 projects, 10 of then related to Natural Language Processing.

Eneko will expend the $50.000 prize in research on “Learning Interlingual Representations of Words and Concepts.”. In the field of language processing Eneko is one of the 10 researchers awarded by Google. In addition to Eneko, also they have been awarded researchers at universities like Harvard, Berkeley, Edinburgh or Washington.

Eneko Agirre: “The goal of this basic research is the interlingual representation of the meaning of words, ie, knowing automatically when the meanings of two words are related in a language or in different languages. It would be like having a special dictionary to know which words have similar meanings. For example, knowing that the meaning of the word ‘banco‘ in Spanish is similar to ‘caja de ahorros‘ (‘savings bank’) and ‘silla‘ (chair’), depending on the word sense, but not to words like ‘cat‘ or ‘Monday‘. We visualize the distance between different senses of a word, and we can thus represent the senses of ‘banco‘, one that resembles ‘savings bank‘ and the other sense similar to ‘chair‘. Our proposal is able to represent the meanings of words from several languages in the same space, which allows us to know that a sense of ‘banco‘ is similar to ‘bank‘ and ‘kutxa‘ in English and Basque, respectively, and that the other sense of ‘banco’ is similar to ‘chair‘ and ‘aulki‘, but none of the two meanings are similar to ‘cat‘ or ‘katu‘”

Eneko Agirre from Ixa Group has been awarded with a Google Research Award (El Diario Vasco, 2015-03-18)

The methods that support this kind of research are taught in Eneko Agirre’s course in the Master “Language Analysis and Processing” at the Faculty of Informatics of the University of the Basque Country in Donostia.

CONGRATULATIONS Eneko!

http://player.vimeo.com/video/129409827?title=0&byline=0

This workshop seeks to build [...]]]> Eneko AGIRRE and Nora ARANBERRI, Ixa Group from University of the Basque Country,  together with Deyi Xiong (Soochow University), Kevin Duh (Johns Hopkins University), and HoufengWang (Peking University), are the organizers of the 2nd Workshop on Semantics-Driven Machine Translation (SedMT)  San Diego, California, USA; June 16, 2016 (co-located with NAACL).

This workshop seeks to build on the success of its precursor S2MT 2015, which was held in conjunction with ACL 2015 in Beijing. This workshop will continue efforts of promoting the shift of interest from syntax to semantics in machine translation, exploring new horizons and cultivating ideas of cutting-edge models and algorithms for semantic machine translation.

QTLeap project Best Paper Award

This year SedMT will award a best paper award among papers which advance MT using lexical emantics and deep language processing.ward is sponsored by the European Union QTLeap project.

IXA talde is a partner in QTLeap (Quality Translation by Deep Language Engineering Approaches),  a project that is run by an European consortium with other seven partners: Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Charles University in Prague, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Higher Functions Lda., Humboldt University in Berlin, University of the Basque Country, University of Groningen and University of Lisbon. For more information and contact details please visit: qtleap.eu.

 Important Dates

Paper submission: March 8, 2016
Notification of acceptance: March 25, 2016
Camera-ready papers due: April 7, 2016
Workshop: June 16, 2016

Sumbissions: http:// hlt.suda.edu.cn/workshop/s2mt/index.html

Recently, at the beginging of June, this project succesfully organized in Denver, Colorado, the SSST-9 – Ninth Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Structure in Statistical Translation collocated with NAACL 2015, June 4, 2015.

The objective of Word Sense Disambiguation is to determine which sense of a word is meant in a particular context. Apache OpenNLP [...]]]> Our colleague Rodrigo Agerri has been selected as the mentor of the project Word Sense Disambiguation – Supervised Techniques presented by Apache Software Foundation to the Google Summer of Code 2015.

The objective of Word Sense Disambiguation is to determine which sense of a word is meant in a particular context. Apache OpenNLP currently lacks a WSD module, therefore, the purpose of this project is to design and build a WSD module that implement the algorithms of common supervised techniques. The implemented techniques could serve as examples for any future contributor that would like to add other approaches.

List of projects accepted into Google Summer of Code 2015