SIG Writing Conference 2024 and first DAAL Workshop

The past couple of weeks have been very busy again with Orphée, Joni and Margot attending the SIG Writing Conference in Paris and Colin’s workshop on Data-Driven Approaches to Ancient Languages (DAAL). Here’s a brief overview of both events:

The biennial SIG Writing Conference took place in Paris from 26-28 June 2024. During the conference, Margot and Joni got the chance to present their research:

• Margot gave an oral presentation about her work on the impact of translation tools on the efficiency for Swedish L2 writers.
• Joni presented a poster on how (generative) AI can be used in writing support for adult learners of Dutch.

At our campus, the very first Data-Driven Approaches to Ancient Languages (DAAL) workshop took place, organised by Colin, Els, Ilse and Maxime. Around 40 participants gathered to discuss the challenges faced when working with less-resourced languages in NLP. Some LT3 colleagues also presented their recent work:

• Tess talked about her work on evaluating generative LLMs for named entity recognition in literary-historical Dutch texts.
• Colin gave a presentation on the hybrid approach to orthographic similarity in graph databases he did research on.
• Loic discussed his analysis of using transformer-based embeddings for unsupervised authorship attribution for medieval Latin.
• Florian introduced his project on early modern Dutch comedies and farces.

Both events were a great success, with interesting keynotes and plenty of networking with peers in the field.