The 9th Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon (BLAH9)
13 - 17 January, 2025
Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan
https://blah9.linkedannotation.org/
Submission due of project proposals : 18 Oct., 2024
SPECIAL THEME
Ensuring Robustness in LLM-based Research: Reproducibility,
Interoperability, and Reliable Evaluation.
INTRODUCTION
BLAH (Biomedical Linked Annotation Hackathon) represents a series of annual
hackathon events, specifically designed to foster open collaboration. The
goal is to achieve a breakthrough in the sharing and linking of various
resources for biomedical literature annotation and mining. By enhancing the
interoperability of these resources, the initiative aims to substantially
increase both the productivity and the impact within the community.
The 9th edition of BLAH (BLAH9) will be held under the special theme "Ensuring
Robustness in LLM-based Research: Reproducibility, Interoperability, and
Reliable Evaluation."
Reproducibility and reliable evaluation are key to ensure that research
remains robust and trustworthy. However, with the recent surge in research
using large language models (LLMs), these important principles have become
largely unclear. Interoperability, a vital component for fostering robust
collaboration and promoting open science, has similarly faced challenges as
LLM-based research expands. Now, two years into the surge of LLM-based
research, it is an opportune moment to reassess and prioritize these
critical aspects of research and development to ensure long-term
sustainability and rigor in the field.
CALL FOR PROJECT PROPOSALS
We are seeking project proposals from individuals and teams interested in
advancing biomedical literature annotation and mining, with a particular
focus this year on enhancing reproducibility, interoperability, and
reliable evaluation in the context of using large language models (LLMs).
Proposals should be structured to achieve measurable outcomes through
collaboration during the hackathon, with clearly defined objectives that
can lead to meaningful insights by the end of the event.
Suggested proposal topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Enhancing interoperability in LLM-based annotation and mining
- Developing reliable evaluation frameworks for LLM-based annotation and
mining
- Improving reproducibility in LLM-based annotation and mining
- ...
Submission due of project proposals is 18 Oct., 2024
TRAVEL SUPPORT
Those who submit project proposals are eligible to apply for travel
support. See the homepage for detailed information.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
- Jin-Dong Kim - DBCLS, ROIS-DS
- Fabio Rinaldi - IDSIA
- Zhiyong Lu - NCBI, NLM
- Lars Juhl Jensen - Univ. Copenhagen
In this newsletter:
LDC data and commercial technology development
New publications:
L2-KSU Native and Non-Native Arabic Speech<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S11>
MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S10>
________________________________
LDC data and commercial technology development
For-profit organizations are reminded that an LDC membership is a pre-requisite for obtaining a commercial license to almost all LDC databases. Non-member organizations, including non-member for-profit organizations, cannot use LDC data to develop or test products for commercialization, nor can they use LDC data in any commercial product, or for any commercial purpose. LDC data users should consult corpus-specific license agreements for limitations on the use of certain corpora. Visit the Licensing<https://www.ldc.upenn.edu/data-management/using/licensing> page for further information.
________________________________
New publications:
L2-KSU Native and Non-Native Arabic Speech<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S11> was developed by King Saud University<http://ksu.edu.sa/en/> (KSU) and contains approximately six hours of Modern Standard Arabic read speech from 80 subjects, along with transcripts and speaker metadata.
The speech data was collected in 2022 from 40 native and 40 non-native speakers. Native speakers were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Palestine, and provided audio recordings through the crowd sourcing platform Khamsat<https://khamsat.com/>. Non-native speakers were Central and West African students enrolled in KSU's Arabic Linguistics Institute; they provided speech recordings on site. All subjects read a series of ten sentences, repeating each sentence multiple times.
2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
*
MATERIAL Somali-English Language Pack<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2024S10> was developed by Appen<http://www.appen.com/> for the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) MATERIAL<https://www.iarpa.gov/index.php/research-programs/material> (Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language) program. It contains 80 hours of Somali conversational telephone speech, transcripts, English translations, annotations, and queries.
Calls were made using different telephones (e.g., mobile, landline) from a variety of environments. Transcripts cover approximately 10% of the speech files, and approximately 4% of the speech files were translated into English. This release also includes domain annotations, English queries, and their relevance annotations.
The MATERIAL program focused on underserved languages with the ultimate goal to build cross language information retrieval systems to find speech and text content using English search queries.
2024 members can access this corpus through their LDC accounts provided they have submitted a completed copy of the special license agreement. Non-members may license this data for a fee.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter, log in to your LDC account<https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/login> and uncheck the box next to "Receive Newsletter" under Account Options or contact LDC for assistance.
Membership Coordinator
Linguistic Data Consortium<ldc.upenn.edu>
University of Pennsylvania
T: +1-215-573-1275
E: ldc(a)ldc.upenn.edu<mailto:ldc@ldc.upenn.edu>
M: 3600 Market St. Suite 810
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Dear all,
I'm looking to recruit a post-doctoral researcher in computer science or digital humanities to my ERC-funded project, which started in May 2024: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/multimodality/a-foundation-for-em…
The project develops novel methods and resources for studying multimodality, or how human communication naturally combines multiple 'modes' of expression. These methods and resources are used to develop empirically founded theories of multimodal communication in the domain of everyday cultural artefacts. The data studied in the project includes, for example, school textbooks, user-generated explanation videos on social media, news broadcasts, instruction manuals and online newspapers.
This is a fixed-term position for 48 months, starting in January 2025 or as agreed, based in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland.
The deadline for applications is October 21, 2024.
RESPONSIBILITIES: The post-doctoral researcher is responsible for developing new methods for querying the multimodal corpora created in the project, which describe the structure of multimodal discourse using graphs that combine crowdsourced human insights and vector representations.
QUALIFICATIONS: The appointee must hold a doctoral degree in digital humanities, humanities computing, language technology, computer science or a related field, and have a keen interest in multimodality. Previous experience of working with knowledge graphs or information retrieval is essential.
For more information, see the full announcement here: https://jobs.helsinki.fi/job-invite/3513/
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Best,
Tuomo Hiippala
---
Dr. Tuomo Hiippala | Professor of English Language and Digital Humanities
Department of Languages | University of Helsinki, Finland | +358 50 377 33 66
http://www.helsinki.fi/~thiippal/ | https://www.helsinki.fi/multimodality
Dear all,
the Faculty of Modern Languages at Heidelberg University invites applications for a
Professorship for “Translation Studies“ (f/m/d)
Open rank: Tenure Track Professorship (W1 to W3) or Full Professor (W3)
to be occupied on October 1, 2025.
The Institute for Translation and Interpreting at the University of Heidelberg offers the position of professor of translation studies with a focus on translation processes and translation workflow.
We are seeking candidates with a first independent research profile after the doctorate for the tenure track level (W1). This position will initially be limited to six years and, following a positive tenure evaluation, will be converted to a permanent W3 full professorship. Candidates that are more qualified may be appointed directly on the full professor level.
Applicants should have a track record of empirical research into the interfaces between different processes, resources and competences of translation and multilingual text production, such as interactions of human, computer-aided and machine translation, innovative forms of inter- and intralingual translation/communication, also in the continuum between spoken and written language (e.g. multimedia/ audiovisual translation, speech-to-text interpreting, translation into “Leichte Sprache”/ Easy Language). Experience in conducting major research projects, success in securing external funding, and a record of participation in academic self-governance will be advantageous.
Deadline for applications: October 31, 2024
More information at:
https://adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_FDB$.startup?MODUL=LS&M1=1&M2=0…https://adb.zuv.uni-heidelberg.de/info/INFO_FDB$.startup?MODUL=LS&M1=1&M2=0…
-----
Prof. Dr. Kerstin Kunz
Institut für Übersetzen und Dolmetschen
Plöck 57a, 69117 Heidelberg
Tel.: 0049-(0)6221-547227
Email: kerstin.kunz(a)iued.uni-heidelberg.de<mailto:kerstin.kunz@iued.uni-heidelberg.de>
Call for submissions: Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS)
The 2nd Conference on Rational Approaches in Language Science (RAILS) will be held in Saarbruecken, Germany, 13-15 February 2025. The central theme of this conference is rational communication, i.e. the idea that language users continuously strive to optimize their means of communication to effectively convey their intended messages. RAILS brings together research on (1) how interlocutors process and update information in diverse situational contexts, (2) how language use is adapted to certain contexts and intended referents, and (3) how linguistic and conceptual information is stored and maintained in short- and long-term memory.
We invite submissions from researchers across the language sciences – including speech science, theoretical linguistics, empirical linguistics, psycholinguistics and neuroscience, computational linguistics, as well as language development, change and evolution – who apply rational probabilistic explanations to linguistic phenomena, or bring novel experimental findings to bear on such accounts.
Keynote speakers:
Mark Dingemanse (Radboud University)
Richard Futrell (University of California, Irvine)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
Rachel Ryskin (University of California, Merced)
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts should be submitted as a single PDF file via https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/43090/submissions/new <https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/43090/submissions/new?behalf=false&f…>, adhering to the guidelines listed on our conference website <https://sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/sfb-conference-2025/>.
We accept submissions for posters and/or talks. Talks are slated for 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions.
Submission of planned work is invited for poster presentation only. Note that, if accepted, we expect results to be presented at the conference.
Important dates:
Submissions open: 8 July, 2024
Submissions due: 16 September, 2024
Notification of acceptance: 4 November, 2024
Registration period: 11 November-16 December, 2024
De-anonymized abstracts due in final form: 2 December, 2024
Conference: 13-15 February, 2025
Scientific Committee:
Regine Bader
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb
Katja Haeuser
Robin Lemke
Ivan Yuen
Scientific and financial support for this conference comes from the Collaborative Research Center SFB1102 Information Density and Linguistic Encoding <https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfb110…>.
For inquiries, please send an email to rails2025(a)lst.uni-saarland.de <mailto:rails2025@lst.uni-saarland.de>.
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb
Associate Professor
Universität des Saarlandes
Language Science and Technology
Campus A2.2, 1.06
66123 Saarbrücken
Tel.: ++49 681 302 70077
E-Mail: s.degaetano(a)mx.uni-saarland.de
www.stefaniadegaetano.com
Dear readers of corpora list,
I am looking for two PhD students / PostDocs excited to work on computational semantics and discourse processing (both applications with a computer science focus and with a corpus linguistics focus are welcome) to join my young research group at the University of Augsburg (near Munich) in Germany. The positions are paid full-time positions and not tied to any specific project. More information on the research environment can be found here: https://hlt-augsburg.github.io/
If you are interested, please contact me directly. Professors & teachers of CL: I would be highly grateful if you would forward this job ad to students who are potentially interested! Many thanks!
Here’s the official job ad:
https://www.uni-augsburg.de/en/jobs-und-karriere/stellenangebote/2024/09/10…
--
Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Best Regards
Prof. Dr. Annemarie Friedrich
Natural Language Understanding with Applications to DH
Fakultät für Angewandte Informatik, Universität Augsburg
https://annefried.github.io
Last Call for Main Conference Papers (COLING 2025)
Important Dates
All deadlines are 11:59 PM UTC-12:00 (“anywhere on Earth”).
Deadline for direct submissions September 16, 2024
Commitment deadline for ARR papers October 20, 2024
Author rebuttal phase (for direct submissions) October 30 - November 1, 2024
Notification of acceptance for COLING 2025 November 29, 2024
Tutorials and Workshops January 19-20, 2025
Main Conference January 21-24, 2025
Website: https://coling2025.org/calls/main_conference_papers/
---------- CFP:
The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2025) will take place in Abu Dhabi, UAE, January 19-24 2025. COLING 2025 invites the submission of long and short papers featuring substantial, original, and unpublished research in all aspects of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Discourse and Pragmatics
Document Classification and Topic Modeling
Ethics, Bias, and Fairness
Information Extraction
Information Retrieval and Text Mining
Interpretability and Analysis of Models for NLP
Language Modeling
Language Resources and Evaluation
Linguistic Insights Derived using Computational Techniques
Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics
Low-Resource and Efficient Methods for NLP
Machine Learning for Computational Linguistics and NLP
Machine Translation and Translation Aids
Multilingualism and Language Diversity
Multimodal and Grounded Language Acquisition
NLP and LLM Applications (such as Education, Healthcare, Finance, Legal NLP, Computational Social Science, etc.)
Natural Language Generation
Offensive Speech Detection and Analysis
Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation
Question Answering
Lexical Semantics
Sentence-level Semantics (Textual Inference, Paraphrasing, etc)
Sentiment Analysis, Stylistic Analysis, Opinion and Argument Mining
Speech Recognition and Synthesis, and Spoken Language Understanding
Summarization and Simplification
Syntactic analysis (Tagging, Chunking, Parsing)
Vision and Robotics
Papers targeting any of these topics from the perspective of the Sustainability Goals of the UN are especially welcome.
Submission Details
COLING 2025 invites the submission of long papers of up to eight pages and short papers of up to four pages. These page limits only apply to the main body of the paper. At the end of the paper (after the conclusions but before the references) papers need to include a mandatory section discussing the limitations of the work and, optionally, a section discussing ethical considerations. Papers can include unlimited pages of references and an unlimited appendix. Authors should follow the general instructions for COLING 2025 proceedings, which are an adaptation of the general instructions for *ACL proceedings.
To prepare your submission, please make sure to use the COLING 2025 style files available here:
LaTeX
Word
Overleaf
Papers deviating from the provided style files will be rejected without review.
COLING 2025 adopts the ACL Ethics Policy.
There are two routes for paper submission:
Direct submission
Papers should be submitted through Softconf/START using the following link: https://softconf.com/coling2025/papers/
Each paper will receive a minimum of three reviews. Authors will have the opportunity to provide a short rebuttal to clarify any misunderstandings. The review process will be double-blind. Reviewers will not see authors, authors will not see reviewers. Reviews and submissions will not be made publicly visible.
ACL Rolling Review (ARR) Papers
Papers which have already been reviewed through the ACL Rolling Review (ARR) system can be committed to COLING 2025. These papers will not be re-reviewed. Senior Area Chairs and Program Chairs will make acceptance decisions based on the ARR reviews and meta-reviews.
Optional Supplementary Materials: Appendices, Software and Data
Each COLING 2025 submission can be accompanied by a single .tgz or .zip archive containing supplementary materials, such as program code and datasets. COLING 2025 encourages the submission of such supplementary materials to improve the reproducibility of results. For the main track, the supplementary materials need to be fully anonymized to preserve the double-blind reviewing policy.
Additional information, such as preprocessing decisions, model parameters or proofs should be put into the appendix of the main PDF submission. Note that submissions need to remain fully self-contained. In particular, any details that are important for reviewers to assess the technical correctness of the work should be included in the main body of the paper.
Anonymity Period
COLING 2025 will follow the ACL Anonymity Policy. As a result, no anonymity period will be required, although authors are still cautioned against extensive advertising. The submissions themselves must still be fully anonymized.
Multiple Submission Policy
Papers which are submitted to COLING 2025 cannot be under review for other conferences or journals at the same time. The commitment process is treated as being under review for a conference. Authors can either commit their paper through ARR or directly submit it to the conference. Papers reviewed and committed to the conference through ARR cannot be submitted directly to the conference. In addition, we will not consider any paper that overlaps significantly in content or results with papers that will be (or have been) published elsewhere. Submissions that violate these requirements will be desk rejected.
General chairs,
Owen Rambow, Stony Brook University
Leo Wanner, ICREA, Pompeu Fabra University
Program co-chairs
Marianna Apidianaki, University of Pennsylvania
Hend Al-Khalifa, King Saud University
Barbara Di Eugenio, University of Illinois Chicago
Steven Schockaert, Cardiff University
For questions about submissions: coling2025-programchairs(a)googlegroups.com
PhD Studentships at the University of Exeter
We’re currently advertising 9 PhD studentships across the Exeter Biomedical Research Centre, including for projects involving AI/NLP for healthcare:
Using natural language processing to understand and enhance therapeutic mechanisms in digital psychological therapy <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.exete…>
Unlocking the Power of UK Hospital Data: Leveraging Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for High-Fidelity Clinical Research <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.exete…>
For more details:
Website – link here <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.exete…>
LinkedIn – link here <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linke…>
‘X’ – link here <https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2FE…>
Fees and funding
For eligible students, the studentship will cover Home tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least £19,237 (in alignment with standard Research Council UK rate) for 3 years full-time, in addition to a Research Training and Support Grant (RTSG). *Students who pay international tuition fees are eligible to apply, but should note that the award will only provide payment for part of the international tuition fee and no stipend. International applicants need to be aware that you will have to cover the cost of your student visa, healthcare surcharge and other costs of moving to the UK to do a PhD. The conditions for eligibility of home fees status are complex and you will need to seek advice if you have moved to or from the UK (or Republic of Ireland) within the past 3 years or have applied for settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme.
Timeline
The closing date for applications is midnight on Tuesday 17th September 2024. Interview panels are anticipated to be held virtually week commencing the 30th September 2024. Expected start dates are between 1st November 2024 and 6th January 2025.
Contact details
If you would like to discuss the studentships further, please contact the primary supervisor as stated in the advert. If you have any queries surrounding the application process or the BRC more generally, please contact Dr Sophie Gould (NIHR Exeter BRC Training and Events Manager) at S.L.Gould(a)exeter.ac.uk <mailto:S.L.Gould@exeter.ac.uk>.
Entry requirements
Applicants for this studentship must have obtained, or be about to obtain, a First or Upper Second Class UK Honours degree, or the equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK, in an appropriate subject area.
If English is not your first language you will need to meet the required level as per our guidance at https://www.exeter.ac.uk/pg-research/apply/english/
Our Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Commitment
The NIHR Exeter Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and Clinical Research Facility (CRF) strongly adhere to Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI) principles. They share a fundamental objective to empower better health outcomes for all patients and the public by translating scientific breakthroughs into potential new treatments, diagnostics and medical technologies.
We are committed to ensuring that the consideration of EDI is second nature to all members of our experimental medicine and translational research community, fostering a fully inclusive environment where everyone feels supported, valued, and is provided the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Our strategy purposefully shares overarching EDI visions with those of the NIHR, UoE and NHS Trust partners to allow for collaborative working to reach our mutual goals. Whilst all applicants will be judged on merit alone, we particularly welcome applications from groups currently underserved within our working community.
Summary
Application deadline: 17th September 2024
Value: For eligible students, the studentship will cover Home tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least £19,237 (in alignment with standard Research Council UK rate) for 3 years full-time, in addition to a Research Training and Support Grant (RTS
Duration of award: per year
Contact: PGR Admissions pgrapplicants(a)exeter.ac.uk <mailto:pgrapplicants@exeter.ac.uk>
----------------------------------------------------
Aline Villavicencio <https://sites.google.com/view/alinev> (she/her)
Professor in Natural Language Processing
Director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence <https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/institutes/idsai/>
University of Exeter (UK)
Dear Corpora-list,
We are advertising a post-doctoral position in ML/XAI : 18 month at IMT
Mines Alès (south of France), or IMT Business School, Evry (near Paris)
Last call for candidates, closing application date 20/09/2024.
Subject: Evaluation of the impact of XAI techniques on Human-Machine
collaboration
Context: ENFIELD project, Horizon-funded European AI Network of
Excellence on adaptive, sustainable, human-centered and trustworthy AI.
Objectives :
Evaluate the impact of XAI methods on Human-Machine collaboration
through the study of :
Performance of the human operator in performing a task, in different
contexts: alone, with the help of a predictive model for which decisions
will be explained/not explained, with the help of an XAI technique,
Types of human-machine collaboration (e.g. delegation, substitution,
mediation), Potential biases induced by XAI techniques.
A focus will be made on specific contexts of study (e.g., image
classification or NLP tasks, XAI techniques based on local
interpretability using attribution methods).
You will contribute to:
Defining the study contexts (e.g. games, image classification) and test
protocols to be considered.
Selecting and implementing predictive models and XAI techniques.
Set up the tools needed to carry out the experiments covered by the
study protocols, e.g. development of simple games, decision interfaces.
Implement the above-mentioned protocols on cohorts of human operators.
Evaluate and promote the results obtained.
Deadline for applications: 20/09/2024
Desired start date: 01/11/2024
Application and additional info:
https://institutminestelecom.recruitee.com/o/post-doctorant-post-doctorante…
Contacts :
Sébastien Harispe, Associate Professor
sebastien.harispe(a)mines-ales.fr
Nicolas Soulié, Associate Professor
nicolas.soulie(a)imt-bs.eu
Best regards,
Andon Tchechmedjiev
--
Andon Tchechmedjiev, PhD. Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence
and Computer Engineering at EuroMov Digital Health in Motion, IMT Mines
Alès. Taxonomy and Semantics of Movement (SemTaxM) co-lead, Learning and
Complexity group member. Research expertise: Deep Learning, Knowledge
Engineering, Computational Linguistics and Semantics, Biomedical
Informatics, Neuroengineering and Human Movement Processing