LT3 Newsletter 2023

With the launch of these projects, we were able to strengthen our team with two new PhD students (Quanqi and Serafina), continue to work with postdoctoral researcher Bram and welcome Paola as a new postdoc. On top of that, PhD students Tess and Amaury are now also affiliated with the team.

At the end of last year, Luna successfully defended her PhD on emotion analysis! 

• De Bruyne, L. (2022). Feeling EmotioNL: automatically detecting emotions in Dutch texts. Ghent University. Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent, Belgium.

During 2022 conferences gradually moved from being fully online to in-person or hybrid editions, which made presenting our work at top NLP conferences and workshops a lot more exciting ;)

Here is an overview of all the conferences and workshops where LT3 researchers presented their latest work: the WASSA and CONSTRAINT workshops at ACL 2022, CLIN32, EAMT2022, LREC2022 (and workshops TERM21, NLPerspectives and SIGUL), NITS, the EARLI SIG Writing conference, SemEval 2022, TALN 2022, EUROCALL 2022, SEPLN 2022, LitMT symposium, CLARIN2022, COLING 2022 (and workshops CRAC and W-NUT), the Workshop Repetition and Ritual, Text and Edition, Challenges and Solutions, workshops CASE, MRL and TSAR-2022 at EMNLP2022, the NLP4CALL workshop and the 6th Linghentian Doctorials.

Moreover, LT3 was also a co-organiser of the 13th WASSA workshop at ACL2022 and successfully organised the EAMT2022 conference  together with CrossLang. Thanks to EAMT2022 we were able to attract 110 participants from all over the globe to the lovely city of Ghent. On the occasion of Luna De Bruyne’s PhD defence, the workshop Feeling EmotioNL was organised offering different expert views on the study of emotion.

• Jasper has been elected as the secretary of EUROCALL’s CorpusCALL SIG.
• Els her FWO junior project “Argumentation mining of political social media text” has been granted → keep a close eye on the News section during the summer for a new PhD student vacancy.
• Lieve was involved in a BOF BAS project where funding was received to buy an EEG.
• Veronique has joined the advisory board of EACL.
• Three LT3 colleagues received funding to work at:
  • ASCoR. From March till May Luna visited Amsterdam (The Netherlands) to work together with professor Toni van der Meer on emotion detection for Dutch crisis communication.
  • Unbabel. From September till December Arda went to Lisbon (Portugal) to join the AI Research Team and collaborate with professor André F.T. Martins to transfer knowledge about domain adaptation for MT and on integrating fuzzy matches into quality estimation for MT.
  • IMS. From September-December Sofie joined the IMS group at Stuttgart (Germany) to work together with PD Dr Roman Klinger on jointly predicting emotions and demographics in text. 
• We are also very happy to announce that various LT3 colleagues managed to take on new challenges in 2022.
  • As of September 2022 Joke has been appointed as assistant professor of human-computer interaction in empirical translation & interpreting studies. Their main affiliation is currently with the EQTIS research group, but they (luckily) remain affiliated with LT3.
  • Also in September, we had to say goodbye to Ayla, who is now a Tenure Track Assistant Professor Translation & Interpreting at KU Leuven - Campus KULAK Kortrijk.

18 CALM students officially graduated on 21 September 2022! 

This academic year, we are happy to train 15 CALM students and 14 incoming students from the EM-TTI program. Last fall semester, this program also enabled us to welcome two academic scholars: Alina Karakanta and Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena.

In 2022 we also continued to spread information about language technology and machine translation to a broader audience:

• Joke gave a presentation and participated in a panel at the 'Vertalen en Technologie' info session organised by the Expertisecentrum Literair Vertalen.
• Lieve and Paola presented at the 12th work congress by the Vlaamse Auteursvereniging. 
• During the Dag van de Wetenschap (Day of Science), Lieve, Veronique, Cynthia and Orphée introduced visitors to our Furhat robot and other demos. There was also a Dutch quiz on machine translation and Lieve and Paola gave a lecture on machine translation.
• Cynthia and Veronique continued to give workshops on language technology at various Flemish secondary schools. 
• During the 'Voice of the Customer' workshop, we presented the results of the SentEMO project. 
• Thanks to Bram, LT3 organized a session of HuggingFace's Machine Learning Demo.cratization tour. 
• LT3 hosted TEKOM Belgium in September 2022.

Keep your eyes out for more in 2023, we are planning some exciting events and even a (Dutch) book on language technology!

We added some new demos to our website: feel free to use the D-Terminer demo to automatically extract terms from a corpus and MATEO to automatically evaluate machine translations. 

This year's summer teambuilding included a little bit of healthy competition: we had our own LT3 Office Olympics. 

Unfortunaly, besides Ayla we also had to say goodbye to three other wonderful colleagues. We wish Gilles, Toon and Thierry all the best with their future endeavours! And finally, we want to congratulate Orphée and Joke for enriching the team with two beautiful babies, welcome to the world!

Here's to a wonderful 2023! We look forward to connect with you online (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn). Feel free to reach out to Prof. dr. Veronique Hoste for further information, questions and comments.