Eneko Agirre won for the third consecutive year the Google prize

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.

Eneko Agirre, member of Ixa Group and professor at the Faculty of Computer Science of the UPV/EHU, is the director of the newly created HiTZ Research Center. The other 6 colleagues in the project are professors Aitor Soroa and Gorka Azkune, researcher Arantxa Otegi, doctoral student Jon Ander Campos, student of Master in Language Analysis and Processing Aitor Agirre and student of Degree in Computer Science Eduardo Vallejo.

Although the project focuses mainly on English dialogues (questions about cooking and food), they are also working with Basque dialogues. For this purpose, last year Ixa Group launched a campaign to recruit volunteers for the collection of interviews in Basque. The campaign was succesfull and many personal interviews were collected in Basque (http://ixa.eus/lagundu).