A couple of days ago, members of our lab participated in PolTAL 2014, a conference bringing together linguists, computer scientists, and other researchers involved in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
After Island, Japan and numerous other distant places, TAL conference made it to Warsaw this year. Therefore, the two of the ADALabers (Michał Jungiewicz and Michał Łopuszyński) used this opportunity to present a poster on Unsupervised Keyword Extraction from Polish Legal Texts.
The conference was full of interesting and informative research reports. All the materials were generously made available by the participants with the encouragement and help from the organisers. Springer published the LNCS volume with PolTAL Proceedings. They promise to keep it available for free within a few weeks after the closing of the conference. So do not hesitate to grab your copy!
Just to wet your appetite before browsing the above materials, let us mention some of our personal highlights.
Johan Bos presented an excellent keynote on Adventures in Meaning Banking, where he gave an overview of the experiences from building Groningen Meaning Bank (GMB). GMB is free! Interestingly, not only you can browse it, download it, but you may also improve the GMB. This last thing you do by playing a game called wordrobe (sic!). This is an excellent application example of game with a purpose – a recently popular strategy to attract volunteers to a project.
Melanie Reiplinger presented a very tasty talk on Relation Extraction for the Food Domain. This was mostly focused on relations substitutedBy and suitsTo. The analysis was carried out on unlabelled data from the chefkoch.de community forum. Melanie and her colleagues even put up a web page with data together with a little demo in German to let you play with their results...
There were also many interesting posters, e.g., Evaluation of IR Strategies for Polish (this is always interesting, if you work with search engines for documents in Polish, like we do), Named Entity Recognition in Tweets (the form of micropost renders many traditional linguistic tools useless, so you have to develop new), or Slovak Web Discussion Corpus and accompanying NLP tools (in terms of the NLP resources, Slavic languages are unpopular and difficult to work with, so we appreciate the efforts of our colleagues from Košice).
The above highlights are by no means exhaustive, we definitely encourage you to fish for your own favourites here and there!
In the meanwhile, we countdown to xTAL 2016, wherever x turns out to be ...