Keynote speakers
Arianna Bisazza is Associate Professor at the Center for Language and Cognition at the University of Groningen. She previously worked as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam and got her PhD from Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy).
Her research revolves around two main directions: First, designing robust NLP algorithms that are equally capable of processing the large diversity of languages spoken around the world. And second, using neural networks to simulate processes of human language learning and the emergence of language universals. She has a long track record of contributions to machine translation for challenging language pairs, cross-lingual model adaptation, and neural model interpretability.
Recently, she was awarded a personal grant from the Dutch Research Council Talent Programme (VIDI) to work on child language acquisition-inspired LMs for morphologically rich languages.
Dirk Hovy is a Professor in the Computing Sciences Department of Bocconi University in Milan, and the scientific director of the Data and Marketing Insights research unit. Previously, he was faculty at the University of Copenhagen, got a PhD from USC’s Information Sciences Institute, and a sociolinguistics master’s from the University of Marburg in Germany.
He is interested in what computers can tell us about language and what language can tell us about society. Dirk is also interested in ethical questions of bias and algorithmic fairness in machine learning. He has authored over 100 articles on these topics, including 4 best and outstanding paper awards, and two textbooks on NLP in Python. Dirk has co-founded and organized several workshops (on computational social science and ethics in NLP), and was a local organizer for the EMNLP 2017 conference in Copenhagen. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant project 2020 for research on demographic bias in NLP.
Outside of work, he enjoys cooking, leathercrafting, and picking up heavy things to put them back down.
Arvi Tavast is director at the Institute of the Estonian Language, previously faculty at University of Tartu and Tallinn University.
After growing up at the Institute of Cybernetics and graduating from Tallinn University of Technology as a systems engineer, he drifted into translation, software localisation and IT terminology. Puzzled by how easy it was to falsify the structuralist and generativist ideas of language held by fellow practitioners, he did his MA and PhD in linguistics at University of Tartu. The first satisfactory answer, however, to why we then understand each other if not by encoding and decoding, he found from the intersection of psychology and information theory during his postdoc at University of Tübingen. He has authored papers on dictionary data models and intellectual property rights for language resources, as well as a university textbook on multilingual specialised communication.
Arvi’s hobbies cluster around folk music and endurance sports; when lifting, he prefers lightweight people to heavy things.