October 2023 - Corpora

BCS Search Solutions 2023: Registration + Confirmed Speakers
by Ingo Frommholz 31 Oct '23

31 Oct '23

INNOVATIONS IN SEARCH AND INFORMATION RETRIEVAL - BCS SEARCH SOLUTIONS - LONDON, UK Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. It is a unique opportunity to bring together academic research and practitioner experience. The Search Solutions event consists of a Tutorial day and a Conference day, each of which has a separate registration. LOCATION Both the Tutorials and the Conference take place at the BCS London Headquarters in London, UK, Ground Floor, 25 Copthall Avenue EC2R 7BP. This is a 10 minute walk from Liverpool Street Station (Elizabeth Line and London Underground) and a 20 minute walk from London Bridge Station. Registration forms on Eventbrite Tutorials: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/search-solutions-2023-tutorials-tickets-7392… Conference: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/search-solutions-2023-conference-tickets-739… TUTORIALS Tutorial 1 November 21, 10am-2pm (half day) How Large Language Models Can Improve Your Search Project (Half-day) Alessandro Benedetti, Sease Ltd. Apache Lucene/Solr committer and PMC member and Director and R&D Software Engineer Tutorial 2 November 21, 10am-4.30pm (full day) Uncertainty Quantification for Text Classification (Full Day) Dell Zhang, Thomson Reuters Labs, London, UK. Murat Sensoy, Amazon Alexa AI, London, UK. Lin Gui, King’s College London, London UK Yulan He, King’s College London & Alan Turing Institute, London, UK. CONFERENCE PROGRAMME OUTLINE November 22, 2023 9.45am - 7pm The objective of the conference this year is to explore the implications and opportunities of AI-based technologies in enhancing the user experience in enterprise, e-commerce and systematic search. The conference marks the first anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022. 09.45 Introductions 09.55 Understanding the Dangers of using LLMs. Professor Julie Weeds, University of Sussex 10.30 Using AI tools for discovery Hong Zhou Wiley Scientific 11.00 Break 11.20 IR, AI and ‘search’ – Creating synergy Steve Zimmerman, Samy Ateia and Martin White consider the opportunities and the issues, with the assistance of the audience! 12.20 BCS Search Industry Awards – Introduction Tony Russell-Rose 12.30 Panel Session looking back at the morning presentations 13.00 Lunch 13.45 Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid. Charlie Hull Open Source Connections 14.15 Retrieval-augmented text generation (RAG) for legal IR Grace Lee 14.45 Ontologies in the age of AI-based discovery Peter Winstanley 15.15 Break 15.50 Presentation of the BCS Search Industry Awards 16.00 New technologies for systematic reviews: are large language models really a gamechanger? James Thomas 16.30 Integrating ChatGPT into existing applications Paul Cleverley 17.00 Panel session – agreeing the take-aways from the conference 17.30 SS2023 Best Paper Award 17.45 Reception 19.00 Close For further details and enquiries, please contact irsg(a)bcs.org.uk. -- Ingo Frommholz (he/him), PhD, FBCS, FHEA Reader (~Associate Professor) in Data Science ACM CIKM 2023 General Chair Head of Data, AI, Interaction, Retrieval and Language Group http://dairel.org Deputy Head Digital Innovations and Solutions Centre (DISC) University of Wolverhampton, UK Adjunct Professor, Bern University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland Web: http://www.frommholz.org/ | Email: ifrommholz(a)acm.org Twitter: @iFromm | Mastodon: @ingo@idf.social PGP/GPG fingerprint: B74E A422 C7B2 A5BB 2BC2 523B 2790 216E F8F8 D166 http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x2790216EF8F8D166

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PhD position in TrustLLM project
by Marcel Bollmann 31 Oct '23

31 Oct '23

The NLP group at Linköping University, Sweden<https://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/aiics/nlp/>, is now hiring a PhD student for research on multilingual LLMs for lower-resourced languages! For this PhD position, you will work within the TrustLLM project, an EU-funded Horizon Europe project on developing open, trustworthy, and sustainable LLMs, initially targeting the Germanic languages. It involves consortium partners from Denmark, Germany, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Specific research topics include: * tokenization and embedding alignment techniques * addressing grammatical correctness and bias in pre-training * benchmarking and evaluation You will also participate in the Graduate School in Computer Science (CUGS) at Linköping University. Your PhD supervisors will be Marcel Bollmann<https://marcel.bollmann.me/> and Marco Kuhlmann<https://liu.se/en/employee/marku61>. This PhD position is a fully-funded, full-time, salaried position with attractive employee benefits and pension contributions. For more information about the position and a link to the application system, please see https://www.ida.liu.se/divisions/aiics/nlp/phd-student-trustllm/ You are welcome to contact me or Marco for additional information. The application deadline is 2023-11-21. Best wishes, Marcel Bollmann -- Marcel Bollmann, Dr. phil. Associate Professor in Natural Language Processing Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden www: https://marcel.bollmann.me/

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PhD student position at Univ Potsdam
by Manfred Stede 31 Oct '23

31 Oct '23

The Applied Computational Linguistics group at Potsdam University conducts research on different perspectives on discourse structure (coherence, coreference, etc.) and on applications of discourse processing, for example in argument mining and in collaborations with social sciences (educational, political science). See http://angcl.ling.uni-potsdam.de. The position to be filled is in a new DFG-funded project with partners in Computer Science (Halle-Wittenberg) as well as Literary Science and E-Research (Berlin). The goal is to implement a solution for text alignment in scenarios where an author writes different versions of the "same" text in different languages; i.e., where portions of the text in the other language can be changed, shortened, extended, or reordered. In collaboration with the team in Halle-Wittenberg, the successful candidate will conduct experiments on building alignments on word, phrase and sentence level. A central basis for these alignments will be measures of semantic similarity, for example by utilizing multilingual word embeddings. The position runs for three years and offers the possibility for obtaining a PhD. Salary is according to the Brandenburg TV-L salary scale (75%), see for instance https://zbb.brandenburg.de/sixcms/media.php/9/Tabelle%20TV-L_2022.pdf Candidates are expected to hold an MSc degree in Computational Linguistics or a related field, with experience in methods relevant to the project. Solid programming skills in Python are required, experience in working with (multilingual) corpora is a plus. Near-native knowledge of either English or German is required, and some knowledge of the other language is a plus. Please send your application before Nov 17th to the email below, consisting of a CV, a statement of research interests and a summary (or a sample chapter of) the MSc thesis; letters of reference may optionally be added. Inquiries and applications to: Prof. Manfred Stede, stede(a)uni-potsdam.de

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CfP - Deadline Approaching: PROPOR 2024 - 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese
by Pablo Gamallo 30 Oct '23

30 Oct '23

******************************************************** PROPOR 2024: 16th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela - Galiza) March 14th to 15th 2024 Call for Papers (Deadline approaching!) https://propor2024.citius.gal/ ******************************************************** *Important dates* * Full and short paper submission deadline: *06/11/2023 (23:59 GMT-3)* * Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: 07/12/2023 * Camera-ready papers due: TBA * Conference: March 14th - 15th, 2024 The International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese ( PROPOR), whose next edition will take place for the first time in Galicia, birthplace of the Portuguese language, is the main event in the area of natural language processing that is focused on theoretical and technological issues of written and spoken Portuguese and Galician (considered as a local variety of the former). The meeting has been a very rich forum for the exchange of ideas and partnerships for the research and industry communities dedicated to the automated processing of this language, promoting the development of methodologies, resources and projects that can be shared among researchers and practitioners in the field. We call for papers describing work on any topic related to computational language and speech processing of Portuguese/Galician by researchers in the industry or academia. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Natural language processing tasks (e.g. parsing, word sense disambiguation, coreference resolution) * Natural language processing applications (e.g. question answering, subtitling, summarization, sentiment analysis) * Natural language generation * Information extraction and information retrieval * Speech technologies (e.g. spoken language generation, speech and speaker recognition, spoken language understanding) * Speech applications (e.g. spoken language interfaces, dialogue systems, speech-to-speech translation) * Resources, standardization and evaluation (e.g. corpora, ontologies, lexicons, grammars) * NLP-oriented linguistic description or theoretical analysis * Distributional semantics and language modeling * Portuguese language varieties and dialect processing (including the language varieties of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Galicia, Guinea-Bissau, Macau, Mozambique, Portugal, and Sao Tome and Principe) * Multilingual studies, methods, applications and resources including Portuguese/Galician PROPOR 2024 will be held at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela - Galicia, Spain) from March 14th to March 15th. PROPOR 2024 will be the 16th edition of the biennial PROPOR conference, hosted alternately in Brazil and in Europe (Portugal/Galicia). Past meetings were held in Lisbon, PT (1993); Curitiba, BR (1996); Porto Alegre, BR (1998); Évora, PT (1999); Atibaia, BR (2000); Faro, PT (2003); Itatiaia, BR (2006); Aveiro, PT (2008); Porto Alegre, BR (2010); Coimbra, PT (2012); São Carlos, BR (2014), Tomar, PT (2016), Canela, BR (2018), Évora, PT (2020), and Fortaleza, BR (2022). Submissions Submissions should describe original, unpublished work. Authors are invited to submit two kinds of papers: * Full papers – Reporting substantial and completed work, especially those that may contribute in a significant way to the advancement of the area. Wherever appropriate, concrete evaluation results should be included. Full papers may consist of up to 8 pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. * Short papers – Reporting small, focused contributions such as ongoing work, position papers, potential ideas to be discussed, or negative results. Short papers may consist of up to 4 pages of content, plus unlimited pages of references. Both Full and Short papers will be published in the proceedings of the main conference. Each submission will be evaluated by at least three reviewers. As reviewing will be double-blind, submitted papers must be anonymized, that is, they should not contain the authors’ names and affiliations. Authors must avoid self-references that reveal identity, like, “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”. Instead, they should prefer citations such as “Smith (1991) previously showed …”. Separate author identification information will be required as part of the submission process. Submissions to PROPOR 2024 may not be made available online (e.g. via a preprint server), and may not be submitted for review elsewhere while being under review for this conference. Submissions should be written in English. At submission time, only PDF format is accepted. For the final versions, authors of accepted papers will be given 1 extra content page to take the reviews into account. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to send the source files for the production of the proceedings. All submitted papers must conform to the official ACL style guidelines. ACL provides style files for LaTeX and Microsoft Word that meet these requirements. They can be found at: * LaTeX styelesheet * MS Word stylesheet Paper should be submitted here in the following URL: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=propor2024 Important dates * Full and short paper submission deadline: 06/11/2023 (23:59 GMT-3) * Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: 07/12/2023 * Camera-ready papers due: TBA * Conference: March 14th - 15th, 2024 Publication The proceedings of PROPOR 2024 will be published by ACL as a volume in ACL Anthology (https://aclanthology.org/ ). They will be available online. To ensure publication, at least one author of each accepted paper must complete an adequate registration for PROPOR 2024 by the early registration deadline. Kindest regards, António Teixeira, Livy Real & Marcos Garcia PROPOR 2024 Program Chairs

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Core metadata scheme for learner corpora - feedback needed!
by Magali Paquot 30 Oct '23

30 Oct '23

Dear colleagues, Last month, we shared the result of our collaborative work on a core metadata scheme for learner corpora with LCR2022 participants. Our proposal builds on Granger and Paquot (2017)'s first attempt to design such a scheme and during our presentation, we explained the rationale for expanding on the initial proposal and discussed selected aspects of the revised scheme. Our proposal is available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-RbX5iUCUtCBkZU9Rfk-kv-Vzc--F-eUW2O…<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.goog…> We firmly believe that our efforts to develop a core metadata scheme for learner corpora will only be successful to the extent that (1) the LCR community is given the opportunity to engage with our work in various ways (provide feedback on the general structure of the scheme, the list of variables that we identified as core and their operationalization; test the metadata on other learner corpora; use the scheme to start a new corpus compilation, etc.) and (2) the core metadata scheme is the result of truly collaborative work. As mentioned at LCR2022, we will be collecting feedback on the metadata scheme until the end of October. The online feedback form is available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NeDUuxGJlPSJI9wHVA1xgGM-aV8jXTa8Qlb45K-…<https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.goog…> We'd like to thank all the colleagues who already got back to us (at LCR2022, by email or via the online form). We also thank them for their appreciation and enthusiasm for our work! We'd also like to encourage more colleagues (and particularly those of you who have experience in learner corpus compilation) to provide feedback! We need help in finalizing the core metadata scheme to make sure that it can be applied in all learner compilation contexts. In short, we need you to make sure the scheme meets the needs of the LCR community at large. With very best wishes, Magali Paquot (also on behalf of Alexander König, Jennifer-Carmen Frey, and Egon W. Stemle) Reference Granger, S. & M. Paquot (2017). Towards standardization of metadata for L2 corpora. Invited talk at the CLARIN workshop on Interoperability of Second Language Resources and Tools, 6-8 December 2017, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Dr. Magali Paquot Centre for English Corpus Linguistics Institut Langage et Communication UCLouvain https://perso.uclouvain.be/magali.paquot/

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NIF & POWLA docuentation
by Hugh Paterson III 28 Oct '23

28 Oct '23

Greetings, I must be looking in all the wrong places, or under the information suppression regime of Google in the USA --- ;-) Is there any HTML presented documentation of NIF or POWLA. I mean for human readability. FaBiO has, in my opinion an excellent HTML (human readable) introduction to the ontology. Others I have found very readable are Dublin Core and LRMI (links below). Any pointers would be much appreciated. Note: I do find the POWLA technical document: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/acoli-repo/powla/main/owl/powla.owl and the NIF document: https://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/ontologies/nif-core/nif-core.ht… Are these the extent of the documentation? By the way, is there an NIF-periphery? There is an NIF-core. Why not just simply NIF? Kind regards, Hugh https://sparontologies.github.io/fabio/current/fabio.html https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/ https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/lrmi/lrmi_terms/2022-06-14/

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Release of UCLouvain Error Editor Version 2
by Sylviane Granger 27 Oct '23

27 Oct '23

UCLouvain Error Editor Version 2 (UCLEEv2) Now Available! We are very pleased to announce that Version 2 of the UCLouvain Error Editor (UCLEEv2) has just been released under a Creative Commons Licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The program can be downloaded from UCLouvain’s Open Educational Resources platform using the following link: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12279/968 The software, which was developed at the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium), aims to facilitate the insertion of error tags and corrections into learner texts, as well as their subsequent processing. It comes with the following functions: * Tagset selection * Menu-driven tag insertion * Tag consistency checking * Concordancing * Error statistics * Automatic exercise generator. By default UCLEEv2 uses the freely available tagset described in the Louvain Error Tagging Manual Version 2.0<https://cdn.uclouvain.be/groups/cms-editors-cecl/cecl-papers/Granger%20et%2…> (Granger, Swallow & Thewissen 2022), but users can also design their own tagset and work with it in UCLEEv2. The initial version of the tagset was developed to tag the first version of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger et al. 2002) and further refined in the context of the two subsequent versions of the ICLE (Granger et al. 2009 and 2020). The various versions have been used in many other learner corpus projects internationally. UCLEEv2 includes a built-in converter which allows users to work on texts tagged with previous versions of UCLEE. The program is accompanied by a detailed user guide<https://cdn.uclouvain.be/groups/cms-editors-cecl/cecl-papers/UCLEE%20user%2…> (Granger, Swallow & Thewissen 2023). We hope that the program will prove useful to researchers interested in assessing the accuracy of L2 writing, investigating errors produced by specific learner groups and designing materials focused on their attested difficulties. Feedback welcome! Sylviane Granger, Helen Swallow and Jennifer Thewissen

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Re: [External] Re: NIF: NLP Interchange Format
by Bilgin, Orhan (Postgraduate Researcher) 26 Oct '23

26 Oct '23

Dear Ada, I agree that lemmatisation is a construct and is not a universal method for linguistic analyses, but I don't understand why it is imperative that I wean myself from using lemmas. What is it that restricts my freedom to invent the lemma (a non-universal construct) AĞAÇ-, for example, to refer to the one and only "meaningful thing" that is common to the very many (theoretically infinite, practically probably around 10,000) strings including ağaç, ağacı, ağaca, ağaçlar, ağacımızdaki, ağaçlandırılabilmesinden, ağaçsızlaşmasını, etc. etc.? How (and why) am I supposed to talk about that very large set without using a label for it? Best, Orhan Bilgin On 17 Oct 2023 18:36, Ada Wan via Corpora <corpora(a)list.elra.info> wrote: This email originated outside the University. Check before clicking links or attachments. Dear Christian Re your PS: one doesn't need to debate the use/future of lemmatization, though I'd welcome such as part of scholarship. For those experienced in matters in/of Linguistics, it should be clear that lemmatization was simply a cconstruct, a entry-level philological exercise (esp. for those from Computer Science with less of a background in Linguistics and language(s)). It has been sad that some have picked up the habit of using lemmatization as a heuristic (though for what, specifically?) and might have become, apparently, too addicted to it to let it go. It is imperative that one weans themselves from such habit. Methods for linguistic morphology, e.g. (morphological) parsing or stemming, are not a universal decomposition scheme, nor a universal method for language/linguistic analyses. Also important is to bear in mind is that neither linguistic morphology nor lemmas/lemmata doesn't/don't have that long of a history. Thanks for being open-minded enough to read this far. Best Ada

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[CFP] for SIGIR Forum - December 2023 Edition (Deadline - Nov 13)
by Tirthankar Ghosal 26 Oct '23

26 Oct '23

Dear Colleague, We invite you to submit your contribution to the upcoming December 2023 Edition of the SIGIR Forum, the official newsletter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR). The SIGIR Forum consists of two issues (June, December). It serves as a medium for disseminating general information and opinions on matters of interest to the IR community, conference and workshop reports, papers and book reviews, and Ph.D. dissertation abstracts. *** Call for Contributions for the December 2023 issue *** We invite contributions to the following categories, including: - Reports of IR-related conferences and workshops: Reports from the chairpersons of IR-related workshops (such as the satellite workshops of SIGIR, JCDL, or CIKM, or other workshops such as NTCIR, INEX) or IR-related conferences other than SIGIR (such as ECIR, HLT, CHIIR, SPIRE, or TREC); - Papers from IR-related invited talks which are not published in full in the relevant conference proceedings; - Papers describing new public infrastructures for IR research, such as in-depth descriptions of newly available test collections, newly available open-source or public domain IR software of particular relevance, new evaluation campaigns, etc.; - Papers about funding initiatives, industry trends, connections between research and industry, legal issues that are of potential interest to the IR community at large; - Any paper that, while of general interest to the IR community, is non-technical, and because of this would be unsuitable for publication in technical publishing forums such as the SIGIR Annual Conference; - Book reviews, bibliographies of general interest to the IR community; - Abstracts of recently published Ph.D. theses of interest to the general IR community. Note: Unless specifically stated, contents of the SIGIR Forum do not represent the official position of SIGIR or ACM. Contributions to the Forum are unrefereed papers unless otherwise indicated. The editorial board may desk-reject papers if they are out of scope. From June 2020 onwards, the SIGIR Forum newsletter is continuing only online. *** Important dates for the June 2023 Edition *** *- 13 November 2023: Deadline for contributions* - December 2023: Online publication *** Submission Instructions *** Kindly see http://sigir.org/forum/ for details on previous issues, template, and submission instructions and checklist. For inquiries about contributions, please contact the editors at editors_SIGIR(a)acm.org. Tirthankar Ghosal (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US) Josiane Mothe (IRIT, Univ. de Toulouse) Julián Urbano (Delft University of Technology) -- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ *Tirthankar Ghosal* Scientist National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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Edge Hill Corpus Research Group, Thursday 9 November 2023
by Costas Gabrielatos 26 Oct '23

26 Oct '23

The next meeting of the Edge Hill Corpus Research Group will take place online (via MS Teams) on Thursday 9 November 2023, 2-3 pm (UK time). Topics: Discourse-Oriented Corpus Studies, Immigration Speaker: Katia Adimora (Edge Hill University, UK) Title: Towards more positive portrayals of Mexican immigration/immigrants in the American and Mexican press Abstract: Various studies (e.g., Galindo Gómez, 2019; Taylor, 2009; Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008) have explored press attitudes towards immigration/ immigrants in different countries. To analyse the attitudes towards Mexican immigration/immigrants in the American and Mexican press, two specialised corpora of 30 million words were created. The American corpus includes more than 12,000 articles from six American newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic and Chicago Tribune. The corpus articles were published between 16 June 2015, which marked the start of Trump's presidential campaign, and 20 January 2021, the date of Biden's presidential inauguration. The Mexican corpus includes more than 20,000 articles from six Mexican newspapers, published during Trump's era: El Universal, Elimparcial.com, Reforma, El Norte, Lacronica.com and Mural. Even though the negative discourse prosodies seem to dominate newspaper discourses, this study argues that the attitudes towards Mexican immigration/immigrants in American and, especially, in Mexican newspapers are not as negative as expected. The results show that two-third (66%) of the instances in American corpus newspapers and more than three quarters (78%) of the instances in Mexican corpus newspapers express a positive perspective. However, among the most frequent negative attitudes in American and Mexican corpus newspapers is the description of immigrants as criminals (20% and 18%). The diachronic frequency analysis of the attitudes towards 'immigration' and 'immigrant(s)' shows correlations between socio-political events and press discourses, which might contribute to public opinion about Mexican immigration/immigrants. For instance, Trump's family separation policy might have ignited empathy towards immigrants in the corpus newspapers. You can register here: https://store.edgehill.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/conferences/events/edge… The EHU CRG programme for 2023-24 is here: https://sites.edgehill.ac.uk/crg/next ________________________________ Edge Hill University<http://ehu.ac.uk/home/emailfooter> Modern University of the Year, The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022<http://ehu.ac.uk/tef/emailfooter> University of the Year, Educate North 2021/21 ________________________________ This message is private and confidential. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and remove it from your system. Any views or opinions presented are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Edge Hill or associated companies. Edge Hill University may monitor email traffic data and also the content of email for the purposes of security and business communications during staff absence.<http://ehu.ac.uk/itspolicies/emailfooter>

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