META-FORUM 2017

Events

META-FORUM 2017 is an international conference on powerful and innovative language technologies for the multilingual information society, the data value chain and the information market place.

 

Programme

13 November 2017 – META-FORUM 2017 Day 1

08:30 Registration
09:15 Opening Session
09:15 Welcome and Introduction
Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany; META-NET General Secretary)
09:25 Welcome Address
Jan Hajič (Charles University in Prague; Chair of META-NET Executive Board)
09:30 Welcome Address
Algirdas Saudargas (Member of the European Parliament)
09:45 Welcome Address
Rytis Martikonis (Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission) (tbc)
09:55 Welcome Address
Mariya Gabriel (Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, European Commission) (tbc)
10:05 Opening Keynote
Multilingual Europe – Current Initiatives and Upcoming Opportunities
Marco Marsella (Head of Unit Learning, Multilingualism, Accessibility, European Commission)
10:35 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
   
11:00 Session 1: Shaping the Human Language Project
   
  The Human Language Project is a vision of a large-scale and long-term research, development and innovation programme with the scientific objective of reaching Deep Natural Language Understanding and Generation by the year 2030.
11:00 Language Equality in the Digital Age – Presentation of a study commissioned by the European Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Committee (STOA)
Maite Melero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
11:15 Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (V1.0): Language Technologies for Multilingual Europe. Towards a Human Language Project
Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany; META-NET)
11:30 In this interactive panel discussion, the participants will discuss, together with the attendants of META-FORUM 2017, the next steps towards the Human Language Project. The goal is to gather feedback from the audience with regard to additional ideas, approaches and technologies to address gaps and needs, the general setup of the Human Language Project, the involvement of industry and other topics.
  Panel discussion with:

  • Maite Melero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain)
  • Jan Hajič (Charles University Prague, Czech Republic)
  • Marco Marsella (European Commission)
  • Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany)
12:30 Poster Session, Software Demos and Lunch Break
   
13:30 Invited Keynote
   
  The Story of DeepL
Gereon Frahling (DeepL, Germany) (tbc)
14:15 Session 2: Lightning Talks – Software Demos and Posters
   
  This session’s schedule will be published soon.
15:00 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
   
15:45 Session 3: News from the Language Communities
  Chair: Georg Rehm (DFKI, Germany)
  An Update on EFNIL’s Europe Language Monitor project
Tamás Váradi (Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and European Federation of National Institutions for Language, EFNIL)
16:05 Session 4: Regional Initiatives – Collaborating towards the Human Language Project
  Chair: António Branco (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
  Participants:

  • Estonia: tba
    Andero Adamson (Ministry of Education and Research)
  • Ireland: The Human Language Project – Developments in Irish Language Technology
    Aodhán Mac Cormaic (Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht)
  • Spain: Spanish Language Technologies Plan
    Ines Rodríguez Pelarda (Secretary of the Information Society and Digital Agenda)
  • Sweden: Building language infrastructure for R&D in Sweden
    Rickard Domeij (The Language Council of Sweden)
17:15 Session 5: From Excellent Research to Successful Commercialisation
  Chair: Luc Meertens (Crosslang, Belgium; LT Innovate)
  Participants:

  • Luc Meertens (Crosslang, Belgium): A Brief Overview of the European LT Industry and the Current State of Play of LT Innovate
  • Marko Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia)
  • Bill Byrne (SDL, UK)
  • David Milward (Linguamatics, UK) (tbc)
17:45 End of META-FORUM 2017 (Day 1)

14 November 2017 – META-FORUM 2017 Day 2

08:30 Registration
09:00 Session 6: The Future of European Machine Translation Research
  Chair: Josef van Genabith (DFKI, Germany)
  Participants:

  • Bill Byrne (University of Cambridge, UK)
  • Tony O’Dowd (KantanMT, Ireland)
  • Marcello Federico (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
  • Hermann Ney (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
  • Khalil Sima’an (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  • Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, UK)
  • Andrejs Vasiļjevs (Tilde, Latvia)
  • Alex Waibel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
10:15 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
   
10:45 Session 7: European Language Technology Industry
   
  Participants:

  • Rebecca Jonsson (Artificial Solutions, Spain)
  • Frank Feulner (AX Semantics, Germany)
  • Maxim Khalilov (Booking.com, The Netherlands)
  • Djamel Mostefa (Systran, France)
  • Andrea Tabacchi (Memsource, Czech Republic)
  • Alessandro Cattelan (Translated, Italy)
12:15 Poster Session, Software Demos and Lunch Break
   
13:30 Session 8: Language Technologies for Digital Public Services
  Chair: Andrea Lösch (DFKI, Germany)
13:30 CEF Automated Translation: Current State of Play
Daniel Prou (Business Manager MT@EC, European Commission)
13:50 ELRC Outcomes and ELRC Network
Stelios Piperidis (ILSP, R.C. “Athena”, Greece)
  ELRC Data
Rihards Kalniņš (Tilde, Latvia)
14:10 CEF eTranslation: Generic Services at a Glance
Khalid Choukri (ELDA, France)
14:30 Session 9: European Research Excellence in LT featuring ERC Grant Holders
  Chair: Joseph Mariani (LIMSI/CNRS, France)
  iHEARu – Intelligent Systems’ Holistic Evolving Analysis of Real-life Universal speaker characteristics
Björn Schuller (University of Augsburg, Germany and Imperial College London, UK)
  MultiMT – Multimodal Machine Translation
Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield, UK)
  DASMT – Domain Adaptation for Statistical MT
Alexander Fraser (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany)
16:00 Poster Session, Software Demos and Coffee Break
16:30 Invited Keynote
  Chair: Alex Waibel (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
  Breaking Language Barriers on Facebook
Necip Fazil Ayan (Facebook, USA)
17:15 Award Ceremony – META Seal of Recognition, META Prize
  Chair and moderator: Georg Rehm (DFKI; META-NET General Secretary)
17:45 Closing Session
   
  Conclusions and Closing Remarks
Jan Hajič (Charles University in Prague; Chair of META-NET Executive Board)
Georg Rehm (DFKI; META-NET General Secretary)
18:00 End of META-FORUM 2017

http://www.meta-net.eu/events/meta-forum-2017/