Andrea Horbach is a researcher at the Language Technology Lab headed by Prof. [...]]]> Andrea Horbach is visiting San Sebastian within the enetCollect network on crowdsourcing for language learning, as part of an ongoing collaborating with Itziar Aldabe, Oier Lopez de Lacalle and Montse Maritxalar about evaluating manually as well as automatically generated reading comprehension questions.

Andrea Horbach is a researcher at the Language Technology Lab headed by Prof. Torsten Zesch at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Last year, she defended her PhD thesis in computational linguistics, titled “Analyzing Short-Answer Questions and their Automatic Scoring: Studies on Semantic Relations in Reading Comprehension and the Reduction of Human Annotation Effort“ at Saarland Universityl. Her main research interests include educational NLP, such as automatic scoring and exercise generation, as well as the processing of non-standard language.

Last Tuesday (2019-09-17 ) she pesented us a talk entitles “Automated and Assisted Content Scoring in Mono- and Cross-Lingual Educational Settings”
Summary:

Automatic content scoring of free-text answers has the goal to reduce the scoring workload of teachers and to provide consistency in scoring. In high-stakes tests, fully automatic scoring is often not an option. Nevertheless teachers can benefit from assisted scoring, where they are supported by NLP but are still in control of the scoring process.This talk presents ongoing work of two research projects related to educational scoring: First, we investigate content scoring in a cross-lingual setup, where a model trained on data in one language is applied to new data in a different language in order to foster educational equality as well as to overcome data sparseness. We present our cross-lingual data collection, as well as machine learning experiments using machine translation to bridge the language gap.

In the second part of the talk we present work on assisted scoring of listening comprehension data from language proficiency testing. We show assisted scoring studies where teachers are supported in scoring answers by the use of clustering techniques.

Karelian languages (Wikipedia)

Abstract: During my visit I would like [...]]]>

Speaker: Ilia Moshnikov
…………Karelian Institute (Joensuu)
Date: Tuesday,June 19, 2018
Time: 15:00-16:00
Place: UPV/EHUko Informatika Fakultatea, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, 20018 Donostia (map)
Title:  Variants of the active past participle in the Border Karelian dialects:
how to study variation between closely related languages?

Karelian languages (Wikipedia)

Abstract:
During my visit I would like to present my research interests. I will speak about my home university in general. I will say a few words about current situation of the Karelian language and usage of it in Internet. During my work in Kiännä-research project I investigated from a virtual linguistic landscape point of view what websites use Karelian as a language of full interface. I will also talk about my doctoral dissertation. Topic of my presentation is Variants of the active past participle in the Border Karelian dialects: how to study variation between closely related languages? I use some statistical methods. Theoretically my background is in language contacts and language variation research.

Short bio:
My name is Ilia Moshnikov and I am a visiting researcher from University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland). I will stay in San Sebastian one month. I am a linguist and my doctoral dissertation is about language contacts between Finnish and Karelian languages in Border Karelian dialects. Moreover, some of my interests are language revitalization and modern language usage. For example, I am involved in Karelian Wikipedia. Originally, I am from Russian Karelia. I speak Karelian, Finnish, English and Russian (a bit Spanish as well). I work as a researcher in Karelian Institute (Joensuu) and teach some Karelian (and Russian) courses.

Abstract:

In this talk I introduce the Open Multilingual Wordnet, a large lexical network of words grouped [...]]]>

Speaker: Francis Bond.
…………Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies,
…………Nanyang Technological University. Singapore
Date: June 13, 2018
Time: 15:00
Place: UPV/EHUko Informatika Fakultatea, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, 20018 Donostia (map)
Title: The Open Multilingual Wordnet

Abstract:

In this talk I introduce the Open Multilingual Wordnet, a large lexical network of words grouped into concepts and linked by typed semantic relations. The talk will cover how the resource has evolved over time (increases in both size and complexity) and introduce some of the latest extensions.

Short bio:

Francis Bond is an Associate Professor at the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He worked on machine translation and natural language understanding in Japan, first at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and then at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, where his focus was on open source natural language processing. He isan active member of the Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELPH-IN) and the Global WordNet Association.  His main research interest is in natural language understanding. Francis has developed and released wordnets for Chinese, Japanese, Malay and Indonesian and coordinates the open multilingual wordnet.

Abstract:

Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language [...]]]> Speaker: Carlo Strapparava
…………….FBK-irst (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Istituto per la ricerca scientifica e Tecnologica)
Date: July 7, 2017,
Time: 09:30
Place: UPV/EHUko Informatika Fakultatea, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, 20018 Donostia (map)
Title: Computational explorations of creative language

Abstract:

Dealing with creative language and in particular with affective, persuasive and even humorous language has often been considered outside the scope of computational linguistics. Nonetheless, it is possible to exploit current NLP techniques starting some explorations about it. We briefly review some computational experiences about these typical creative genres.

Short bio:

Carlo Strapparava is a senior researcher at FBK-irst (Fondazione Bruno Kessler – Istituto per la ricerca scientifica e Tecnologica) in the Human Language Technologies Unit.
His research activity covers artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, knowledge-based systems, user models, adaptive hypermedia, lexical knowledge bases, word-sense disambiguation, affective computing and computational humour. He is the author of over 200 papers, published in scientific journals, book chapters and in conference proceedings. He has the Italian scientific habilitation for full professor in informatics and engineering.
He regularly serves in the program committees of the major NLP conferences (ACL, EMNLP, etc.). He was executive board member of SIGLEX, a Special Interest Group on the Lexicon of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2007-2010), Senseval (Evaluation Exercises for the Semantic Analysis of Text) organisation committee (2005-2010).
On June 2011, he was awarded with a Google Research Award on Natural Language Processing, specifically on the computational treatment of creative language.

The third generation of machine translation systems is currently under active development. After initially dominating the field, rule-based machine translation (RBMT) systems have been gradually replaced by data-driven approaches in the last two decades, with statistical [...]]]> Neural Machine Translation
Open workshop with Kyunghyun Cho
Donostia, 2017-05-29

Trends in Neural Machine Translation (Olof Mogren, 2016)

The third generation of machine translation systems is currently under active development. After initially dominating the field, rule-based machine translation (RBMT) systems have been gradually replaced by data-driven approaches in the last two decades, with statistical machine translation (SMT) systems prevailing as the main paradigm. In the last two years, deep learning approaches have significantly impacted the field, with the rise of neural machine translation (NMT) as the new state-of-the-art in automated translation. This event presents advanced results in the field, in particular for machine translation of Basque.
Context:

The MODELA project was created to advance research and development in deep-learning approaches to machine translation and to address the many challenges of Basque machine translation. The project is financed by the Basque Government and is being carried out by the following entities: Ametzagaiña, Elhuyar, ISEA, UPV/EHU (IXA group) and Vicomtech-IK4.

Guest:

The main speaker will be Kyunghyun Cho (Center for Data Science, New York University), who is an eminent researcher in the area, the most referenced on NMT, a field in which he has obtained a Google prize. Additionally, he is a a brilliant speaker.

Date: May 29, 2017, 11:00
Place: UPV/EHUko Informatika Fakultatea, Manuel de Lardizabal 1, 20018 Donostia (map)
Schedule:

• 11.00-11.15: Introduction and presentation of the project
• 11.15-12.30: Neural Machine Translation (Kyunghyun Cho)
• 12.30-13.15: First results in the Modela project

Sponsor: Modela project and University of the Basque Country

Next day, on Tuesday May 30, at 15:00 he will be with the students of our Master on Language Technology

The presentation can be seen here:

Distributional Semantics and Machine Learning for Statistical Machine Translation Author: Mikel Artetxe Zurutuza Supervisors: Eneko Agirre eta Gorka Labaka

The Irish government have asked a group (two members from Dublin City University, and three from Trinity College Dublin) to [...]]]> Speaker: Teresa Lynn ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University
Data: October 13th 2015, Tuesday
Time: 15:00-16:00
Room: 3.2 room. Faculty of Informatics (UPV/EHU)
Title: Overview of the current status of Irish language technology

The Irish government have asked a group (two members from Dublin City University, and three from Trinity College Dublin) to compile a digital strategy for Irish language technology. Teresa Lynn will be next week visiting Basque Country to gain insight from our experience in the area of developing resources for Basque, another low-resourced language, and to see what advice they could harness from those experiences. We asked her to present us an overview of the current status of Irish language technology.