Escuela de Lingüística Computacional ELiC 2010

Transcription

1 Escuela de Lingüística Computacional ELiC 2010 July 26-30, Departamento de Computación Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales - Universidad de Buenos Aires - Argentina Introduction ELiC 2010 was a one-week winter school in Computational Linguistics that took place on July 26-30, 2010 at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. The main goals of ELiC 2010 were to: introduce the field of Computational Linguistics to graduate students in Latin America; provide an opportunity for students and professionals in the area of Computational Linguistics to get to know a different sub-field; serve as a meeting point for researchers in Computational Linguistics in Latin America; and help create a Latin American community in the field of Computational Linguistics. The first instance of ELiC was co-located with the Escuela de Ciencias Informaticas (ECI, ECI is organized yearly by the Universidad de Buenos Aires in July or August, and has a long standing reputation as a high-quality winter school in Computer Science in Argentina. The first ELiC took advantage of the organizational infrastructure of ECI, such as advertising, registration, preparation of reading material, and classrooms. ELiC had its own program committee, which was in charge of academic aspects such as selecting courses and awarding grants. Courses Courses were organized in three blocks: morning, afternoon and evening. Each block consisted of two courses, one with two lectures (6hs) and the other with three lectures (9hs). Each block had a common theme, presented by each of the two courses in a different way, and was evaluated at the end of the school via a take-home exam. This evaluation allowed granting credits towards graduate and undergraduate degrees in several fields, including Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences. In total, 132 registered students attended ELiC 2010, many of which took two or all three course blocks. The description of each of the course blocks follows: Block #1 (morning): Text Mining and Parsing of Natural Language Part 1 (9 hours): Minería de Textos (Text Mining) José Castaño (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Part 2 (6 hours): Inducción de estructuras sintácticas desde una perspectiva computacional (Inducing syntactic structure from a computational perspective) Gabriel Infante-López (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) Number of registered students: 67. 1

2 Block #2 (afternoon): Natural Language Generation Part 1 (9 hours): Introducción a la Generación de Lenguaje Natural (Introduction to Natural Language Generation) Carlos Areces (INRIA Grand Est, Francia / Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) Part 2 (6 hours): Generación de Instrucciones en un Entorno Virtual (Generating Instructions in a Virtual Environment) Luciana Benotti (INRIA Grand Est, Francia / Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) Number of registered students: 68. Block #3 (evening): Natural Language Processing Tools and Evaluation Part 1 (9 hours): Taller de Métodos y Herramientas de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (Hands-on Course on Methods and Tools for Natural Language Processing) Laura Alonso Alemany (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) Parte 2 (6 hours): Evaluación de Sistemas de Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural (Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems) Paula Estrella (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba) Number of registered students: 68. The number of students attending the courses was well above our expectations and we were very pleased with the way the school was received. It was clear during the school that students are interested in the field, and feel the lack of opportunities to access to the current state of the art. It was also interesting to see students and researchers from the fields of Linguistics (and Humanities in general) taking part of the main school ECI, which usually target students with a CS, Maths or Engineering background. Pictures from the Courses 2

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6 Student Grants Thanks to NAACL s support, ELiC was able to give a AR$ 400 (roughly US$ 100) grant to nine students from educational institutions from all over Argentina and from neighboring Uruguay. Each student was required to attend at least 80% of the lectures from at least two ELiC 2010 course blocks. Full Name) Matías Calvo Damian Ezequiel Blasi Francisco J. C. Caballero Fernando Fontana Mathias Etcheverry Mendez Fabio Gaiera Maria Florencia Ossola Pablo Speciale Pablo Magariños Lucca Martin Trabes (*) Affiliation Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca Instituto Balseiro, San Carlos de Bariloche UTN - Facultad Regional Córdoba Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia San Juan Bosco, Comodoro Rivadavia Universidad de la Republica, Montevideo (Uruguay) Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Neuquén Universidad Nacional de Salta Universidad Nacional de Rosario UTN Facultad Regional Tucumán Universidad Nacional de San Luis (*) Martín Trabes is the only grant awardee that did not attend the school. That money was reassigned to cover lecturers' travelling costs (see Budget section below). The following figure shows the geographical distribution of the grants (students cities are marked with green bubbles and the location of ELiC 2010 is marked with a pink bubble). As this figure shows, our grants were well distributed geographically. 6

7 Budget Of the 1500 US dollars awarded by NAACL to ELiC 2010, US$ 900 were used for student grants, as detailed above. The remaining US$ 600 were used to partially cover travel and accommodation costs of lecturers Laura Alonso Alemany, Carlos Areces, Luciana Benotti, Paula Estrella and Gabriel Infante López, all of which had to travel from the city of Córdoba to Buenos Aires (700 km). Each lecturer received AR$ 500 (roughly US$ 120). This amount only covered a portion of the travel and accommodation expenses of the lecturers, the remaining expenses were covered from their own resources. Program Committee Pablo Daniel Agüero (Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina) Laura Alonso Alemany (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina) Carlos Areces (Univ. Nac. de Córdoba, Argentina, & INRIA Grand Est, Nancy, France) Luciana Benotti (Univ. Nac. de Córdoba, Argentina, & INRIA Grand Est, Nancy, France) Gemma Boleda (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, España) José Castaño (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) Paula Estrella (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina) Raquel Fernández (ILLC, Universidad de Amsterdam, Holanda) Luciana Ferrer (SRI International, EEUU) Agustín Gravano (Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina) Gabriel Infante-López (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina) Lluís Padró (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, España) Horacio Rodríguez (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, España) Horacio Saggion (University of Sheffield, Reino Unido) Vera Strube de Lima (PUCRS, Brasil) Dina Wonsever (InCo, UdeLaR, Uruguay) Final Evaluation We believe that the event was highly successful. The number of participants was above our expectations, and all courses were well received. We feel that the event achieved the goals we set for it, and served to increase the visibility of the field of computational linguistics in Argentina. It also provided a concrete motive for collaboration between different researchers in the field, collaboration which is now continuing in the joint organization of other events and research efforts. As a concrete example, some of the people involved in the organization of ELiC is now involved in the organization of the Workshop in Natural Language Processing and Web Based Technologies that will be co-located with Iberamia 2010, from the 1st to the 5th of November in Bahia Blanca, Argentina. 7

8 ELiC 2011 The Program Committee of ELiC 2010 decided that the second edition of ELiC will take place in late 2011 in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, where it will be hosted by the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. The school will be collocated with the second edition of the Workshop in Natural Language Processing and Web Based Technologies. We plan to apply for funding from NAACL and other sources to support these events. Improvements for future installments Because ELiC was organized this year as part of ECI, we were somehow conditioned by the format of the main winter school. In particular, it was not possible to organize plenary events that will gather all ELiC s participants. In future installments of ELiC we would like to organize such events, perhaps in the form of an invited speaker lecture, to provide further opportunities for community building. It would also be very interesting to include a Student Session where undergraduate and graduate students working in computational linguistics have a chance to show their research and received feedback. 8