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Multilingual Europe Technology Alliance

META-FORUM 2017 - Programme

Programme

13 November 2017 – META-FORUM 2017 Day 1

08:30 Registration


09:10 Opening Session
09:10 Welcome and Introduction (Slides)
Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany; META-NET General Secretary)
09:20 Welcome Address (Slides)
Jan Hajič (Charles University in Prague; Chair of META-NET Executive Board)
09:30 Welcome Address
Algirdas Saudargas (Member of the European Parliament)
09:45 Welcome Address
Rytis Martikonis (Director-General for Translation, European Commission)
10:00 Opening Keynote (Slides)
Multilingual Europe – Current Initiatives and Upcoming Opportunities
Marco Marsella (Head of Unit Learning, Multilingualism, Accessibility, European Commission)
10:30 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
11:15 Session 1: Shaping the Human Language Project
The Human Language Project is a vision of a large-scale and long-term research, development and innovation programme with the scientific objective of reaching Deep Natural Language Understanding and Generation by the year 2030.
11:15 Language Equality in the Digital Age – Presentation of a study commissioned by the European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Committee (STOA) (Slides)
Maite Melero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
11:30 Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (V1.0): Language Technologies for Multilingual Europe. Towards a Human Language Project (Slides)
Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany; META-NET)
11:45 In this interactive panel discussion, the participants will discuss, together with the attendants of META-FORUM 2017, the next steps towards the Human Language Project. The goal is to gather feedback from the audience with regard to additional ideas, approaches and technologies to address gaps and needs, the general setup of the Human Language Project, the involvement of industry and other topics (Slides).
Panel discussion with:
  • Maite Melero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
  • Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield, UK)
  • António Branco (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
  • Jan Hajič (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
  • Marco Marsella (European Commission)
  • Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany) – moderator
12:45 Poster Session, Software Demos and Lunch Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
13:45 Invited Keynote
Chair: Jan Hajič (Charles University in Prague)
A Language Transparent Society
Alex Waibel (Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) – Details
14:30 Session 2: News from the Language Communities
Chair: Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany)
14:30 An Update on EFNIL's Europe Language Monitor project (Slides)
Tamás Váradi (Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and European Federation of National Institutions for Language, EFNIL)
15:00 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Elena Montiel-Ponsoda (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
15:45 Session 3: Regional Initiatives – Collaborating towards the Human Language Project
Chair: António Branco (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
15:45Estonia: Sustainable Development of Language Technology in Estonia (Slides)
Andero Adamson (Ministry of Education and Research)
16:00 Ireland: The Human Language Project – Developments in Irish Language Technology (Slides)
Aodhán Mac Cormaic (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht)
16:15 Spain: Spanish Language Technologies Plan (Slides)
Ines Rodríguez Pelarda (Secretary of the Information Society and Digital Agenda)
16:30 Sweden: Building language infrastructure for R&D in Sweden (Slides)
Rickard Domeij (The Language Council of Sweden)
16:45 Q/A – discussion with all speakers
17:00 Session 4: From Excellent Research to Successful Commercialisation
Chair: Luc Meertens (Crosslang, Belgium; LT Innovate)
17:00A Brief Overview of the European LT Industry and the Current State of Play of LT Innovate (Slides)
Luc Meertens (Crosslang, Belgium)
17:10 Cross-lingual technology as a global social sensor (Slides)
Marko Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
17:30 Turning NMT research into commercial products (Slides)
Bill Byrne (SDL, UK)
17:50 Q/A – discussion with all speakers
18:00 End of META-FORUM 2017 (Day 1)

14 November 2017 – META-FORUM 2017 Day 2

08:30 Registration


09:00 Session 5: The Future of European Machine Translation Research
Moderator: Josef van Genabith (DFKI, Germany) (Slides)
Participants:
  • Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge, UK)
  • Tony O'Dowd (KantanMT, Ireland)
  • Marcello Federico (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
  • Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
  • Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, UK)
  • Andrejs Vasiļjevs (Tilde, Latvia)
  • Alex Waibel (Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
10:15 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Volker Steinbiss (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
10:45 Session 6: European Language Technology Industry
Chair: Bernardo Magnini (FBK, Italy)
10:45Beyond intents – NLU for Conversational UIs (Slides)
Rebecca Jonsson (Artificial Solutions, Spain)
11:00 Leverageing a rule-based approach to automated text generation (Slides)
Frank Feulner (AX Semantics, Germany)
11:15 Machine translation that makes sense: the Booking.com use case (Slides)
Maxim Khalilov (Booking.com, The Netherlands)
11:30 Pure Neural Machine Translation: How it works (Slides)
Djamel Mostefa (Systran, France)
11:45 Automated Quality Estimation of Machine Translation Output (Slides)
Andrea Tabacchi (Memsource, Czech Republic)
12:00 T-Rank. A decision support system for project assignment (Slides)
Alessandro Cattelan (Translated, Italy)
12:15 Q/A – discussion with all speakers
12:30 Poster Session, Software Demos and Lunch Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Volker Steinbiss (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
13:30 Session 7: Language Technologies for Digital Public Services
Chair: Andrea Lösch (DFKI, Germany)
13:30 CEF Automated Translation: Current State of Play (Slides)
Markus Foti (Business Manager MT@EC, European Commission)
13:50 ELRC Outcomes and ELRC Network (Slides)
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, R.C. "Athena", Greece)
ELRC Data (Slides)
Rihards Kalniņš (Tilde, Latvia)
14:10 CEF eTranslation: Generic Services at a Glance (Slides)
Khalid Choukri (ELDA, France)
14:30 Session 8: European Research Excellence in LT featuring ERC Grant Holders
Chair: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI/CNRS, France)
14:30 iHEARu – Intelligent Systems' Holistic Evolving Analysis of Real-life Universal speaker characteristics (Slides)
Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg, Germany and Imperial College London, UK)
14:55 MultiMT – Multimodal Machine Translation (Slides)
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, UK)
15:20 DASMT – Domain Adaptation for Statistical MT (Slides)
Alexander Fraser (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany)
15:45 Q/A – discussion with all speakers
16:00 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
Chair of the demo and poster session:
Volker Steinbiss (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
16:30 Invited Keynote
Chair: Alex Waibel (Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Breaking Language Barriers on Facebook
Necip Fazil Ayan (Facebook, USA) – Details
17:15 Award Ceremony – META Seal of Recognition, META Prize
Moderator: Georg Rehm (DFKI; META-NET General Secretary) (Slides)
17:45 Closing Session
Conclusions and Closing Remarks (Slides)
Jan Hajič (Charles University in Prague; Chair of META-NET Executive Board)
Georg Rehm (DFKI; META-NET General Secretary)
18:00 End of META-FORUM 2017
Note: This agenda is subject to change. The organisers reserve the right to change the programme and details of the agenda without prior notice.