NEWS The Sixth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC) was held at Umeå University, 17-18 November, 2016.
The SLTC conference concerns all aspects of language technology, including natural language processing, speech technology, and relevant neighboring areas. In 2016, the conference was organized by the Department of Computing Science of Umeå University. The scientific program consisted of invited lectures and presentations of papers selected by the international program committee.
The keynote speakers were:
Prof. Jill Burstein, Princeton. Prof. Burstein s research interests span discourse and sentiment analysis, argumentation mining, education policy, English language learning, and writing research. Her work has led to two extensively used commercial applications for English L2 learners; E-rater, ETS automated essay evaluation application, and the Language Muse Activity Palette, a new classroom tool that automatically generates language activities for classroom texts to support content comprehension.
Assoc. Prof. Marco Kuhlmann, Linköping University. An expert on efficient algorithms for NLP. He has served on the editorial boards of the journals Computational Linguistics and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and as the president of SIGMOL, the Association for Mathematics of Language. His work has been recognized with the E. W. Beth Dissertation Prize of the Association for Logic, Language and Information, and with a Google Faculty Research Award.
Prof. Mehryar Mohri, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Previously at AT&T Labs-Research, Google Research, Ecole Normale Superieure, and Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Prof. Mohri s research interests cover ML, automata theory, and NLP. He is on the boards of several journals including the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Machine Learning journal, and the Journal of Automata, Languages and Combinatorics. Finally, he has authored the textbook Foundations of Machine Learning.
Prof. Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute and the University of Trento. Previously at the Universities of Texas, Columbia, Colorado and John Hopkins, and at IBM Research. The only European faculty participating at the Jeopardy! challenge with IBM Watson. He is an expert on machine learning (ML) and has published about 220 scientific articles. Prof. Moschitti has received four IBM Faculty awards, one Google Faculty award, five best paper awards, and a best researcher award from the Trento University.
Photo above: Speakers Mehryar Mohri, Marco Kuhlmann, Jill Burstein and Alessandro Moschitti together with Johanna Björklund från Umeå University (second from right).
Editor: Mikael Hansson