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ACL 2019

This year, the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2019) was held in Italy for the first time in over half a century.

The Italian community around AILC – Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale – played a fundamental role in the organization and the course of the event.

ACL 2019 in Florence turned out to be e great success and will be remembered as one for the record books, with both the greatest number of submissions and the largest ever attendance: 3,300 participants from all over the world.

By |2019-08-13T10:30:14+02:0013 Aug, 2019|EVENTS, NEWS|

AILC Master Thesis Prize 2018 assigned

Also this year, in connection with its annual conference (CLiC-it), AILC assigned a prize for the best master thesis in computational linguistics defended at an Italian University.

The committee was composed by a member of the AILC board (Cristina Bosco), a chair of CLiC-it 2017 (Malvina Nissim), and a chair of CLiC-it 2018 (Elena Cabrio). Theses defended between August 1st 2017 and July 31st 2018 were eligible for the 2018 edition.

Five theses were submitted, with the following geographical distribution: Trento (1), Turin (1), Bologna (1), Rome (1), Milan (1). Gender was quite balanced, with two theses written by female students and three by male students.

The evaluation was performed by the three committee members individually in a first stage, after having agreed on a set of specific criteria which had to do both with content (including originality and timeliness of the topic), as well as writing (including clarity, style, and the structure of the thesis). At a second stage, the committee jointly discussed each thesis in details during several Skype meetings, and came up with a short list of two theses, which all deserved the prize. The choice of a final winner was not at all easy, and the reason why eventually we selected the one we selected is its being the closest to the core of our discipline. The first AILC prize for the best master thesis in computational linguistics was thus awarded to:

Enrica Troiano “A Computational Study of Linguistic Exaggerations” (supervised by Carlo Strapparava)

The thesis proposes a system that is able to decide whether a text is hyperbolic (i.e. it contains exaggerated sentences). It contributes to the state of the art in Computational Linguistics with the introduction of HYPO, a resource which contains more than 700 exaggerations of current use in English; a classifier is then trained to recognize overstatements and probes the consistency of theoretical studies on this matter. Research questions and challenges addressed by the master thesis are listed and clearly contextualized and motivated. The jury member have really appreciated the originality of the proposed topic, and the candidate effort in providing a complete framework for addressing the task of hyperbolic sentences detection with a dataset, a complete experimental setting and evaluation.

A special mention was assigned to the Master Thesis of Oronzo Antonelli “Studio e implementazione di un sistema ensemble per il parsing dell’italiano” (supervised by Fabio Tamburini) for the solid experimental setting in which 8 existing parsers for Italian are reimplemented and tested on social media data, providing a very interesting and valuable comparaison of the state of the art on parsing Italian.

As part of the prize, Enrica received a monetary sum from AILC, free membership to the association for one year, and free attendance to CLiC-it 2019. At the conference the whole community got the chance to listen to Enrica’s presentation of her thesis.

We are already looking forward to next edition!

Elena Cabrio, Cristina Bosco, and Malvina Nissim

By |2019-03-07T14:10:16+01:006 Mar, 2019|EDUCATION, NEWS|

AILC Master Thesis Award

By |2017-05-23T12:21:51+02:0024 Apr, 2017|NEWS|

Lectures on Computational Linguistics 2017

Lectures on Computational Linguistics 2017 is a two-day event featuring tutorials on foundational topics in Computational Linguistics to be held at the University of Pavia on May, 4-5 2017. This year’s event follows the first edition, which took in 2016 at FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler), in Trento.

The event is organized by the Doctoral School of Linguistic Sciences of the University of Bergamo-Pavia in collaboration with Fondazione Bruno Kessler,  with the endorsement of AILC, the Italian Association of Computational Linguistics.

We invite students and all those interested in computational linguistics to participate. Participation is free but subject to registration.

For more information and for registration please visit the event website.

 

Below is the schedule:

May 4, 2017 – classroom L2 – Palace St. Thomas, University of Pavia

  • 10:45 Opening session: Elisabetta Jezek (University of Pavia)
  • 11:00 to 13:00 Tutorial 1: Data Annotation for NLP Tasks, Bernardo Magnini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento)
  • 14:30 to 16:30 Tutorial 2: Morphological Analysis, POS-tagging and Lemmatisation, Fabio Tamburini (University of Bologna)
  • 16:45 to 17:45 Students presentations

May 5, 2017 – classroom L5 – Palace St. Thomas, University of Pavia

  • 9:30 to 11:30 Tutorial 3: Discourse and Dialogue, Matthew Purver (Queen Mary University of London)
  • 11:45 to 12:45 Students presentations
  • 14:00 to 16:00 Tutorial 4: An old Artificial Intelligence dream that comes true: Merging language and vision modalities, Raffaella Bernardi (University of Trento)
  • 16:00 to 16:30 Closing remarks
By |2017-05-04T12:35:55+02:0012 Apr, 2017|NEWS|
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