LT3 Newsletter 2022

LangTech	SentEMO: Multilingual, aspect-based and emotion analysis LoCKe: Low-Shot Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer METRICS: Modelling Emotion TRajectories in Customer Service dialogues Common-sense: Modelling common-sense knowledge in automatic irony detection
TransTech/EdTech	WiLMa: Writing in a Second Language with Machine Translation
DHTech	Byzantine Greek Paratexts CLS Infra: Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure CLARIAH-VL

With launching these projects, we strengthened the LT3 team with new PhD students (Pranay, Aaron, Margot and Colin) and researchers (Ellen and Toon). In addition, we welcomed two new professors (Prof. dr. Orphee de Clercq and Prof. dr. A. Seza Doğruöz) and a new postdoctoral research assistant (Dr. Ayla Rigouts Terryn)

Three of our junior researchers successfully defended their PhD in 2021. Congrats!

The past year LT3 members have presented their work at various top NLP conferences RANLP 2021 , NAACL-HLT 2021, ACL-IJCNLP 2021, SIGDIAL 2021, Petra-e Conference 2021 and workshops WASSA 2021 (@EACL2021), AmericasNLP (@NAACL-HTL 2021), SemEval 2021 (@ACL-IJCNLP 2021), LaTeCH (@EMNLP2021). Besides this, LT3 was actively involved in the organisation of various workshops (WASSA2021, EcoNLP, NLP for Economics) and an international conference on computational linguistics (CLIN31). 

In 2021, CALM postgraduate students completed  their industrial internships (across high tech companies in Belgium) and we also hosted three external students (KU Leuven and Antwerp University) during their internships at LT3. At the beginning of the 2021-2022 fall semester, we launched the European Masters in Technology for Translation and Interpreting (EM-TTI) as an Erasmus Mundus Master program (international collaboration with the University of Wolverhampton, UK; University of Malaga, Spain and the New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria).

We did not only produce research output for the academic audience but also invested time in educating younger audiences around AI and NLP. Dr. Cynthia Van Hee and Prof. dr. Veronique Hoste participated in the KIKS AI on school project and gave a two-day workshop on chatbots, sentiment analysis, Python notebooks, and ethics in AI for the students at the Sint-Bavo school in Ghent. And our roadshow will continue in 2022! Please check “chatbot: leerkrachtenhandleiding” (in Dutch) if you are interested in some easily accessible school material for teaching about AI to your students.

In 2021, COVID-19 was still forcing us to work a lot more from home than we wanted to. Luckily, we managed to organize a live summer team building activity and sailed through Ghent on the water:

For our three graduating PhD students, we also prepared  personalized gifts:

Finally, congratulations to both Claudia and Cynthia who have enriched our team with two wonderful babies. We look forward to share many more exciting updates and achievements in 2022!