March 2023 - Corpora

1st CFP: 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
by Ekaterina Kochmar 21 Apr '23

21 Apr '23

First Call for Papers The 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023) Toronto Thursday, July 13, 2023 (co-located with ACL 2023) https://sig-edu.org/bea/current *Submission Deadline: Monday, April 24, 2023, 11:59pm UTC-12* WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION The BEA Workshop is a leading venue for NLP innovation in the context of educational applications. It is one of the largest one-day workshops in the ACL community with over 100 registered attendees in the past several years. The growing interest in educational applications and a diverse community of researchers involved resulted in the creation of the Special Interest Group in Educational Applications (SIGEDU) <https://www.aclweb.org/adminwiki/index.php?title=2019Q3_Reports:_SIGEDU> in 2017, which currently has over 300 members. We will solicit papers that incorporate NLP methods, including, but not limited to: - automated scoring of open-ended textual and spoken responses; - automated scoring/evaluation for written student responses (across multiple genres); - game-based instruction and assessment; - educational data mining; - intelligent tutoring; - collaborative learning environments; - peer review; - grammatical error detection and correction; - learner cognition; - spoken dialog; - multimodal applications; - annotation standards and schemas; - tools and applications for classroom teachers, learners and/or test developers; and - use of corpora in educational tools. INVITED TALKS The workshop will feature invited talks from Susan Lottridge (Cambium Assessment) and Jordana Heller (Textio), as well as a speaker from one of the IAALDE <https://alliancelss.com/> societies. IMPORTANT DATES All deadlines are 11:59 pm UTC-12 (anywhere on earth). - Anonymity Period Begins: *Friday, March 24, 2023* - Submission Deadline: Monday, April 24, 2023 - Notification of Acceptance: Monday, May 22, 2023 - Camera-ready Papers Due: Tuesday, May 30, 2023 - Workshop: Thursday, July 13, 2023 SUBMISSION INFORMATION We will be using the ACL Submission Guidelines for the BEA Workshop this year. Authors are invited to submit a long paper of up to eight (8) pages of content, plus unlimited references; final versions of long papers will be given one additional page of content (up to 9 pages) so that reviewers’ comments can be taken into account. We also invite short papers of up to four (4) pages of content, plus unlimited references. Upon acceptance, short papers will be given five (5) content pages in the proceedings. Authors are encouraged to use this additional page to address reviewers’ comments in their final versions. Papers which describe systems are also invited to give a demo of their system. If you would like to present a demo in addition to presenting the paper, please make sure to select either “long paper + demo” or “short paper + demo” under “Submission Category” in the START submission page. Previously published papers cannot be accepted. The submissions will be reviewed by the program committee. As reviewing will be blind, please ensure that papers are anonymous. Self-references that reveal the author’s identity, e.g., “We previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”, should be avoided. Instead, use citations such as “Smith previously showed (Smith, 1991) …”. We have also included conflict of interest in the submission form. You should mark all potential reviewers who have been authors on the paper, are from the same research group or institution, or who have seen versions of this paper or discussed it with you. We will be using the START conference system to manage submissions: https://www.softconf.com/acl2023/bea2023/ DOUBLE SUBMISSION POLICY We will follow the official ACL double-submission policy <https://www.aclweb.org/archive/policies/current/double-submission-policy.ht…>. Specifically: Papers being submitted both to BEA and another conference or workshop must: ● Note on the title page the other conference or workshop to which they are being submitted. ● State on the title page that if the authors choose to present their paper at BEA (assuming it was accepted), then the paper will be withdrawn from other conferences and workshops. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE - Ekaterina Kochmar <https://ekochmar.github.io/about/>, MBZUAI - Jill Burstein <https://sites.google.com/site/jbursteinets/>, Duolingo - Andrea Horbach <https://www.ltl.uni-due.de/team/andrea-horbach/>, FernUniversität in Hagen - Ronja Laarmann-Quante <https://www.ltl.uni-due.de/team/ronja-laarmann-quante>, Ruhr University Bochum - Nitin Madnani <https://desilinguist.org/>, Educational Testing Service - Anaïs Tack <https://anaistack.github.io/>, KU Leuven - Victoria Yaneva <http://www.victoriayaneva.info/>, National Board of Medical Examiners - Zheng Yuan <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~zy249/>, King’s College London - Torsten Zesch <https://www.ltl.uni-due.de/team/torsten-zesch>, FernUniversität in Hagen Workshop contact email address: bea.nlp.workshop(a)gmail.com

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CfP: Workshop on Open Community-Driven Machine Translation (CrowdMT) at EAMT2023
by Miquel Esplà 04 Apr '23

04 Apr '23

*Apologies for cross-posting* 1st Workshop on Open Community-Driven Machine Translation (CrowdMT) Tampere, Finland, on June 15, 2023 *https://macocu.eu/workshop* <https://macocu.eu/workshop> First Call for Papers The 1st edition of the Workshop on Open Community-Driven Machine Translation (CrowdMT) will be held in Tampere, Finland, on June 15, 2023, co-located with EAMT 2023. The workshop aims to be as open as possible: we invite everybody that works on topics related to machine translation in an open and community-driven way. We welcome submissions either as a full paper or just an abstract. The full papers have to present previously unpublished work, but abstract submission is open for anybody who wishes to discuss their relevant work. This work can be previously published, work in progress or simply a proposal for a new project. Topics for submissions include, but are not limited to: - development of machine translation toolkits, - platforms and services; - collection and curation of datasets that can be used to build machine translation systems; - automatic post-editing software and data; - machine translation quality estimation software and data; - machine translation evaluation; - integration of machine translation in computer-aided translation; - use of monolingual resources to improve machine translation; and - software, data and models licensing issues. Submission information The workshop accepts submission in two different modalities: - Abstracts: authors can submit abstracts up to 1 page that summarize the contribution of a work/paper. If accepted, authors will have the option of having their abstracts included in the proceedings of the workshop. - Papers: authors can submit papers between 4 and 10 pages (including appendices but not references). If accepted, in addition to presenting their work to the audience, authors will be requested to submit a camera-ready version of paper that will be included in the proceedings of the workshop. Submissions should be formatted according to the EAMT 2023 guidelines <https://events.tuni.fi/eamt23/second-call-for-papers/> and submitted in PDF through EasyChair page (link to be announced). Important dates - Workshop paper/abstracts due: 14th April 2023 - Notification of acceptance: 28th April 2023 - Camera-ready papers/extended abstracts due: 12th May 2023 - Workshop date: 15th June 2023 -- Dr. Miquel Esplà-Gomis Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics Universitat d'Alacant Carretera de Sant Vicent del Raspeig s/n 03690 Sant Vicent del Raspeig, Alacant (Spain) Tel: +34 965903400 ext. 2424

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list of authors and their work ...
by Albretch Mueller 02 Apr '23

02 Apr '23

there are all kinds of lists on wikipedia of various kinds of authors: linguists, philosophers, mathematicians ... In most (almost all?) cases there is a brief page about the authors biography and their work. As you could expect some folks (isbndb.com) would come up with the great idea of selling you the air you breathe. exaly.com, worldcat, freelibrary.org ... do a minimally better job, but their web interface I find too constraining and, "of course", you don't find a "download the whole damn thing" option. What I am looking for is an openly and collectively maintained DB a la wikipedia from which interface you could download all search hits as well-formatted, parsable lines in a text file without having to "click next", copy and paste, and all that kind of nonsense. I could imagine someone in the corpora research community has taken the time to compile a database which IMO should include: a) work: a.1) original name a.2) original language a.3) topical bags index a.4) received category index (a children book, book review, degree theses, article in periodical, ...) a.5) publications: a.5.1) date a.5.2) metadata RDF including: language, "co-"authors (preface, those writing back-cover blurbs), editors, translators, ISBNs, publisher, copyright notice, ... b) name(s): b.1) first/given name(s) (at Birth) b.2) last name(s) (at Birth) b.3) pen name(s) b.3) also known as c) birth place d) date of birth e) languages f) date of death Authorship - work pairs should be prioritized. In case of compilations of various auth-work pairs in a single book, the compilation in which an article appears should be specified in the metadata. Please, let me know where could I find such a database (even if partially) which could be downloaded. In case you don't know such a general registry of published books/texts, which other entries would you think are important? lbrtchx

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LREC-COLING 2024 Announcement
by Sara Goggi 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

Dear Jennifer, I am Sara Goggi from Pisa, working on the organization of the LREC conferences (and involved in ARR as well). We met last year in Dublin at ACL 2022. In the past I used to contact Priscilla for asking her the favour to disseminate the LREC posts and she has always been very responsive in posting our announcements/CfPs within the ACL community. Please note that David Yarowsky (cc'ed here) supports using ACL's publicity mechanism for both LREC and COLING announcements. Thanks very much in advance! Sara ++++++ * ***LREC-COLING 2024 Announcement**** _LREC-COLING 2024 - The 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation__ __Lingotto Conference Centre - Turin (Italy)__ __20-25 May, 2024_ *Conference website: https://lrec-coling-2024.lrec-conf.org/ *Twitter: @LrecColing2024 Two major international key players in the area of computational linguistics, the ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL), are joining forces to organize the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) to be held in Turin (Italy) on 20-25 May, 2024. The hybrid conference will bring together researchers and practitioners in computational linguistics, speech, multimodality, and natural language processing, with special attention to evaluation and the development of resources that support work in these areas. Following in the tradition of the well-established parent conferences COLING and LREC, the joint conference will feature grand challenges and provide ample opportunity for attendees to exchange information and ideas through both oral presentations and extensive poster sessions, complemented by a friendly social program. The three-day main conference will be accompanied by a total of three days of workshops and tutorials held in the days immediately before and after. *General Chairs* Nicoletta Calzolari, CNR-ILC, Pisa Min-Yen Kan, National University of Singapore *Advisors to General Chairs* Chu-Ren Huang, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Joseph Mariani, LISN-CNRS, Paris-Saclay University *Programme Chairs* Veronique Hoste, Ghent University Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa Sakriani Sakti, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Nianwen Xue, Brandeis University *Management Chair* Khalid Choukri, ELDA/ELRA, Paris *Local Chairs* Valerio Basile, University of Turin Cristina Bosco, University of Turin Viviana Patti, University of Turin

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Research fellowships in NLP, University of Oslo
by Erik Velldal 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

[Apologies for cross-posting] Two positions as Research Fellow in Natural Language Processing are available in the Language Technology Group (LTG) in the Machine Learning Section at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. The two 3-year positions are affiliated with a new research project focusing on event extraction in the domain of armed conflicts, a cross-disciplinary collaboration bridging NLP and political science / conflict research. For more information, please see the full announcement here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/243246/researcher-in-natural… The closing date is May 7th, 2023. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any further information. Best regards, -erik -- Erik Velldal Language Technology Group Section for Machine Learning Department of Informatics, University of Oslo

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2nd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to Disagreement in NLP: First Call for Papers
by simona.frenda＠gmail.com 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

***NLPerspectives*** 2nd Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to Disagreement in NLP (and Beyond) https://nlperspectives.di.unito.it/w/2nd-workshop-on-perspectivist-approach… Until recently, the dominant paradigm in natural language processing (and other areas of artificial intelligence) has been to resolve observed label disagreement into a single “ground truth” or “gold standard” via aggregation, adjudication, or statistical means. However, in recent years, the field has increasingly focused on subjective tasks, such as abuse detection or quality estimation, in which multiple points of view may be equally valid, and a unique ‘ground truth’ label may not exist (Plank, 2022). At the same time, as concerns have been raised about bias and fairness in AI, it has become increasingly apparent that an approach which assumes a single “ground truth” can erase minority voices. Strong perspectivism in NLP (Cabitza et al., 2023) pursues the spirit of recent initiatives such as Data Statements (Bender and Friedman, 2018), extending their scope to the full NLP pipeline, including the aspects related to modelling, evaluation and explanation. In line with the first edition, the NLPerspectives (Perspectivist Approaches to Disagreement in NLP) workshop will explore current and ongoing work on: the collection and labelling of non-aggregated datasets; and approaches to modelling and including these perspectives, as well as evaluation and applications of multi-perspective Machine Learning models. We also welcome opinion pieces and literature reviews, e.g., in the context of fairness and inclusion. A key outcome of this second edition will be to build on the work begun at https://pdai.info/ to create a repository of perspectivist datasets with non-aggregated labels for use by researchers in perspectivist NLP modelling. Authors are, therefore, invited to share their LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) and provide essential information about resources (i.e., also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work or are a result of their research. In addition, authors will be required to adhere to ethical research policies on AI and may include an ethics statement in their papers. The NLPerspectives workshop will be hosted in person during the 26th edition of ECAI 2023 in Kraków, Poland, on 30 September or 1 October 2023. -->Submissions The contributions cannot exceed 7 pages (4 for research communications, see below) not including references, and as established by ECAI 2023 conference, the over length submissions will be rejected without review. The papers should be submitted as a PDF document, conforming to the formatting guidelines provided in the call for papers of ECAI 2023 conference: https://ecai2023.eu/ECAI2023 We accept three types of submissions: - Regular research papers; - Non-archival submissions: like research papers, but will not be included in the proceedings; - Research communications: 4-page abstracts summarising relevant research published elsewhere. -->Topics We invite original research papers from a wide range of topics, including but not limited to: - Non-aggregated data collection and annotation frameworks - Descriptions of corpora collected under the perspectivist paradigm - Multi-perspective Modelling and Machine Learning - Evaluation of multi-perspective models/ models of disagreement - Multi-perspective disagreement as applied to NLP evaluation - Fairness and inclusive modelling - Perspectivist approaches for social good - Applications of multi-perspective modelling - Computing with (dis)agreement - Perspectivist Natural Language Generation - Foundational aspects of perspectivism - Opinion pieces and reviews on perspectivist approaches to NLP Submissions are open to all, and are to be submitted anonymously (and must conform to the instructions for double-blind review). All papers will be refereed through a double-blind peer review process by at least three reviewers, with final acceptance decisions made by the workshop organisers. Scientific papers will be evaluated based on relevance, significance of contribution, impact, technical quality, scholarship, and quality of presentation. More information about the submission, publication of proceedings and date of the workshop will be provided soon. We are seeking sponsors in order to provide financial support for conference registration, travel, and accommodation for participants. -->Attendance At least one author of each accepted paper is required to participate in the conference and present the work. -->Important Dates * Friday June 23, 2023: Paper submission * Friday August 4, 2023: Notification of acceptance * Friday September 1, 2023: Camera-ready papers due * Saturday September 30 or Sunday October 1, 2023: Workshop -->Workshop organisers: Gavin Abercrombie, Heriot-Watt University Valerio Basile, University of Turin Davide Bernardi, Amazon Alexa Shiran Dudy, University of Colorado, Boulder Simona Frenda, University of Turin Lucy Havens, University of Edinburgh Elisa Leonardelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Contact us at g.abercrombie(a)hw.ac.uk if you have any questions. Website: https://nlperspectives.di.unito.it/

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Journal of Open Humanities Data: call for papers
by Barbara McGillivray 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

(Apologies for cross-postings) Call for Papers for 2023 The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD)<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/> features peer-reviewed publications describing humanities research objects with high potential for reuse. These might include curated resources like (annotated) linguistic corpora, ontologies, and lexicons, as well as databases, maps, atlases, linked data objects, and other data sets created with qualitative, quantitative, or computational methods. We are currently inviting submissions of two varieties: 1. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential. These are short (1000 words) highly structured narratives. A data paper does not replace a traditional research article, but rather complements it. 2. Full length research papers discuss and illustrate methods, challenges, and limitations in humanities research data creation, collection, management, access, processing, or analysis. These are intended to be longer narratives (3,000 - 5,000 words), which give authors the ability to contribute to a broader discussion regarding the creation of research objects or methods. Humanities subjects of interest to the JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, Classics, History, Linguistics, Literature, Modern Languages, Music and musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, etc. Research that crosses one or more of these traditional disciplinary boundaries is highly encouraged. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/#repo>. More information about the submission process<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/submissions>, editorial policies<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/editorialpolicies/> and archiving<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/> is available on the journal’s web pages. JOHD provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We accept online submissions via our journal website. See Author Guidelines <https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/about/submissions/> for further information. Alternatively, please contact the editor<https://openhumanitiesdata.metajnl.com/contact/> if you are unsure as to whether your research is suitable for submission to the journal. Authors remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/> licence agreement. Barbara McGillivray | @BarbaraMcGilli<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.c…> Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation Group lead of the Computational Humanities Research Group<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/computational-humanities-research-group> Strand Campus, Strand, London, WC2R 2LS, Room 3.28, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London Group lead of the Computational Humanities Research Group at King’s College London<https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/computational-humanities-research-group> Turing Fellow<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.turin…>, The Alan Turing Institute Editor-in-chief of Journal of Open Humanities Data<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopenhuman…>

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[SEBD 2023] Extension Deadlines - Regular, Discussion, and Doctoral Consortium Papers
by Stefano Marchesin 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

[APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE POSTINGS] ================================================================== CALL FOR PAPERS - SEBD 2023 31st Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD 2023) Galzignano Terme, Padova, Italy - 2-5 July 2023 Venue: Galzignano Resort Terme & Golf, Galzignano Terme, Padova, Italy Website: http://sebd2023.dei.unipd.it/ ================================================================== The SEBD Symposium is the major annual event of the Italian database research community. It is designed as a gathering forum to meet, discuss, and exchange experiences among all people from the academy and industry who are interested in database systems and all their broad range of applications. IMPORTANT DATES - EXTENDED DEADLINES --------------- Regular and Discussion Paper Submission Deadline: April 14, 2023 Notifications: May 10, 2023 - Doctoral Consortium Submission Deadline: April 14, 2023 Papers Notification: May 10, 2023 - Early Registration Deadline: May 26, 2023 Camera-Ready Submission Deadline: Thursday, June 08, 2023 (AoE) All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth (AoE) standard time. TOPICS ------ The conference covers a broad range of topics, including traditional database management and new challenges for data management in any possible domain. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to) the following: - Big Data and Smart Computing; - Data integration, Heterogeneous and Federated Databases; - Data mining, knowledge discovery, information extraction, and machine learning; - Data provenance, publishing, and citation; - Data visualization; - Data warehousing; - Distributed and parallel databases; - Grid, peer-to-peer databases and Cloud Computing; - Incompleteness, inconsistency, and uncertainty in databases; - Keyword-based and natural language access to structured data; - Knowledge representation and reasoning; - Ontology-based data management; - Privacy, security, and trust management; - Query processing and optimization, approximate query answering; - Real-time, embedded, sensor, and mobile databases; - Scientific and Statistical Databases; - Semantic Web and Open Linked Data; - Social networks and Graph databases; - Transaction and workflow management, interoperability, and Web services; - Big Data and AI. SUBMISSIONS INSTRUCTIONS ------------------------ SEBD 2023 invites research, industry, application contributions, and software demonstrations submissions. Regular papers presenting original work are solicited. Moreover, discussion papers containing descriptions of results already published are also welcomed. There are three submission formats: - Regular papers (up to 12 pages + references). Original research works. Regular papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. - Discussion papers (up to 8 pages + references). Results and ideas of interest to the SEBD audience, including extended abstracts of recent publications of the authors, papers currently under submission, position papers, system and application descriptions and presentations of preliminary results. - Doctoral Consortium papers (up to 6-7 pages, including selected references). The papers should be singly authored by a current Ph.D. student or a Ph.D. student who submitted the thesis between September and December 2022; if accepted, it will be presented at the Doctoral Consortium session. Selection will be based on originality, clarity, and technical quality. To accommodate a potentially large number of papers, this year, we introduce poster sessions as an alternative to present the accepted regular and discussion papers. The authors of an accepted paper will be asked if they prefer a classic oral or poster presentation. Nevertheless, the program committee will suggest the best way to present a paper based on the contribution type and the number of accepted papers from the same institution/research group. The program chairs will make the final decision on the presentation format. Please note that oral or poster presentations have the same "importance" within the conference. Also, there will be no difference between a paper presented orally or as a poster in the proceedings. A booster session will introduce all poster presentations where the authors can pitch the contribution with a 1-2 minute presentation. Submissions of papers must be in English, in PDF format, and formatted following the new CEUR-ART 1-column style, which is the style requested for the camera-ready preparation. Please download the template here: http://sebd2023.dei.unipd.it/file/CEURART_SEBD2023 Submission system: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/SEBD2023/ All accepted works will be included in the proceedings, with Discussion Papers clearly marked as such. Proceedings will be published on WS-CEUR.org and indexed in Scopus. After acceptance, authors are required to re-submit the final PDF. No different format is allowed. All accepted papers are expected to be presented at the conference,and at least one author is required to register for the conference. DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM ----------- The SEBD 2023 Doctoral Consortium will take place in a dedicated session during the 31st Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems (SEBD 2023), Galzignano Terme, Padova (Italy), July 02-05, 2023, http://sebd2023.dei.unipd.it/. The goal is to provide a forum for Ph.D. candidates to present their ongoing research and receive feedback from renowned and experienced research community members. The Consortium fosters a collaborative environment, encouraging constructive discussions and sharing of ideas. It will be an excellent opportunity for developing person-to-person networks to the benefit of the Ph.D. students in their future careers – as well as of the community. Doctoral Consortium Day: Sunday, July 02, 2023 A separate call for papers will be issued for the doctoral consortium. ORGANIZATION COMMITTEES ----------------------- General Chairs: - Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) - Nicola Ferro (University of Padua) Program Committee Chairs: - Claudia Diamantini (Università Politecnica delle Marche) - Gianmaria Silvello (University of Padua) Doctoral Consortium Chairs - Stefano Marchesin (University of Padua) - Letizia Tanca (Politecnico di Milano) LOCATION -------- The SEBD 2023 conference will be in Galzignano Terme, Padova, Italy, at The Galzignano Resort Terme & Golf. The resort is located in the very heart of this stunning area, a unique complex with three 4-star hotels and one of the largest Spa centers in Europe, with natural waters at 37°C, a new Galzignano Wellness Spa, Beauty & Medical Center, a 9-hole golf course, haute cuisine and all amenities for an unbelievable stay. Its location makes the resort an ideal base for visiting the cultural treasures of some of Italy’s finest historical cities, such as Venice, Padua, and Verona, and appreciating the Veneto area's fine food and wine trails. Get to Padua: https://www.unipd.it/en/university-0/getting-here -- Stefano Marchesin, PhD Postdoctoral Researcher Information Management Systems (IMS) Group Department of Information Engineering University of Padua Via Gradenigo 6/a, 35131 Padua, Italy Home page: http://www.dei.unipd.it/~marches1/

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Postdoc position at Cardiff University
by Steven Schockaert 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

Location: Cardiff, UK Deadline for applications: 19th April 2023 Start date: as soon as possible Duration: 30 months Keywords: natural language processing, neurosymbolic AI, graph neural networks, commonsense reasoning Details about the post Applications are invited for a Research Associate post in the Cardiff University School of Computer Science & Informatics, to work on the EPSRC Open Fellowship project ReStoRe (Reasoning about Structured Story Representations), which is focused on story-level language understanding. The overall aim of this project is to develop methods for learning graph-structured representations of stories. For this post, the specific focus will be on developing common sense reasoning strategies, based on graph neural networks, to fill the gap between what is explicitly stated in a story and what a human reader would infer by “reading between the lines”. More details about the post and instructions on how to apply are available here: https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CYR611/research-associate Background about the ReStoRe project When we read a story as a human, we build up a mental model of what is described. Such mental models are crucial for reading comprehension. They allow us to relate the story to our earlier experiences, to make inferences that require combining information from different sentences, and to interpret ambiguous sentences correctly. Crucially, mental models capture more information than what is literally mentioned in the story. They are representations of the situations that are described, rather than the text itself, and they are constructed by combining the story text with our commonsense understanding of how the world works. The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has made rapid progress in the last few years, but the focus has largely been on sentence-level representations. Stories, such as news articles, social media posts or medical case reports, are essentially modelled as collections of sentences. As a result, current systems struggle with the ambiguity of language, since the correct interpretation of a word or sentence can often only be inferred by taking its broader story context into account. They are also severely limited in their ability to solve problems where information from different sentences needs to be combined. As a final example, current systems struggle to identify correspondences between related stories (e.g. different news articles about the same event), especially if they are written from a different perspective. To address these fundamental challenges, we need a method to learn story-level representations that can act as an analogue to mental models. Intuitively, there are two steps involved in learning such story representations: first we need to model what is literally mentioned in the story, and then we need some form of commonsense reasoning to fill in the gaps. In practice, however, these two steps are closely interrelated: interpreting what is mentioned in the story requires a model of the story context, but constructing this model requires an interpretation of what is mentioned. The solution that is proposed in this fellowship is based on representations called story graphs. These story graphs encode the events that occur, the entities involved, and the relationships that hold between these entities and events. A story can then be viewed as an incomplete specification of a story graph, similar to how a symbolic knowledge base corresponds to an incomplete specification of a possible world. The proposed framework will allow us to reason about textual information in a principled way. It will lead to significant improvements in NLP tasks where a commonsense understanding is required of the situations that are described, or where information from multiple sentences or documents needs to be combined. It will furthermore enable a step change in applications that directly rely on structured text representations, such as situational understanding, information retrieval systems for the legal, medical and news domains, and tools for inferring business insights from news stories and social media feeds.

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Funded PhD position on Deep Learning for Neuroimaging to Speech Decoding @ HiTZ center
by HiTZ zentroa 31 Mar '23

31 Mar '23

**** We apologize for the multiple copies of this email **** Funded PhD position on Deep Learning for Neuroimaging to Speech Decoding @ HiTZ center (Spain) INFORMATION ABOUT THE POSITION * Position: PhD student * Researcher Profile: o First Stage Researcher (R1- up to the point of PhD) The candidate should have a BSc degree related to computer science and a MSc. including deep learning or machine learning subjects. Outstanding curriculum vitae, good programming abilities, strong motivation, team working skills, and fluent spoken and written English will be highly appreciated. * Project: #neural2speech Deep Learning for neuroimaging to speech decoding * Location: Spain > Donostia or Bilbao (free choice) * Research Field: Multimodal Deep Learning * Type of contract/Duration of Contract: 3 years * Job Status: Full-time * Hours per week: 35 * Gross salary: 17,221€ (1st year), 17,823€ (2nd year), 19,765€ (3rd year) * Starting date: June 2023 (hard date) HiTZ zentroa - IXA Taldea is offering a 3-year funded PhD opportunity. The position is linked to the IKUR #neural2speech project: the PhD student will work on research projects with IXA Taldea (HiTZ center - University of the Basque Country) in collaboration with two research groups Aholab (HiTZ center - University of the Basque Country) and The Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (BCBL). * HiTZ - https://www.hitz.eus/ <https://www.hitz.eus/> o Ixa Taldea - http://ixa.ehu.eus/ <http://ixa.ehu.eus/> o Aholab - https://aholab.ehu.eus/aholab/ <https://aholab.ehu.eus/aholab/> * BCBL - https://www.bcbl.eu/en <https://www.bcbl.eu/en> Goal:Can speech be decoded from neural brain activity? Addressing this issue is critical for restoring communication among people that have lost their ability to speak due to some speech motor disorders (e.g., aphasia). The goal of #neural2speechis to build a multimodal contrastive model trained on both neuroimaging input (fMRI and MEG) and speech output. The multimodal contrastive model that we propose is based on the neural transformer architecture. Job description:The project will be highly collaborative across the three laboratories involved, including common activities and coordinated research agendas. The selected candidate will develop the core model of the project, the multimodal Transformer model, and disseminate the results in scientific conferences (presentations/posters) and peer-reviewed journals. She/he will take advantage of the computation facilities at HiTZ. The selected candidate will also have the opportunity to develop original experiments under the supervision and guidance of the PIs. PI and research group:candidate will form part of HiTZ research center led by Eneko Agirre (e.agirre(a)ehu.eus) and Ander Barrena (ander.barrena(a)ehu.eus), who will also be the main supervisors. Contact: ander.barrena(a)ehu.eus *HiTZ **Basque Center for Language Technology* is a reference center on Language Technologies. Its aim is to promote research, training, technological transfer and innovation in Artificial Intelligence focused on language and speech. We are a multidisciplinary team composed of people with backgrounds in computer science, linguistics and engineering. HiTZ is made up of the research groups Ixa and Aholab, both from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). These groups are —since their creation in 1988 and 1995 respectively— the main driving forces in the area of Language Technologies in the Basque Country. HiTZ is a leader in research in Spain, and holds a National Research Award in Computer Science and one of the 15 fellows that the main research association in the area (Association for Computational Linguistics) has in Europe, as well as the best PhD thesis award in Artificial Intelligence in Europe (EurAI 2020). HiTZ is also a member of Erasmus Mundus+ European Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies (LCT) program <https://www.ehu.eus/en/web/master/master-language-communication-technologies>. The University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) (www.ehu.eus) is the leading teaching and research institution in the Basque Country, a prosperous region stretching along the Atlantic coast of northern Spain. The UPV/EHU is among the *best 400 universities in the world* according to the Shanghai ranking, and has been recognized as an International Excellence Campus by the Spanish Government. The University of the Basque Country, a vibrant 30-year-old institution with 45,000 students, 5,000 world-class academic staff and state-of-the-art facilities distributed throughout 20 centers in its three campuses. **

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