Invited Speakers

Mathieu Lafourcade – University of Montpellier

The JeuxDeMots project aims to build a large knowledge base of common sense (and also specialty) knowledge, in French, using games (GWAP – games with a purpose), contributory approaches, and inference mechanisms. In this perspective, about ten games have been designed, and each of them allows either to collect specific information, or to check the quality of the data acquired through another game. 

In this presentation, I will focus on describing some of those games and the nature of the data collected and constructed since the launch of the project in the summer of 2007. In particular, I will discuss the following aspects: the structure of the lexical and semantic network, some types of relations (semantic, ontological, subjective, semantic roles, associations of ideas), activation and inhibition issues, annotation of relations (meta-information), semantic refinements (management of polysemy), the creation of clusters allowing the representation of richer knowledge (n-argument relations).

Biography

Mathieu Lafourcade is a teacher and researcher in computer science at the University of Montpellier, and he carries out his research at LIRMM (Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier). He did his doctorate in computer science at Grenoble (Université Joseph Fourier) on issues related to the design and implementation of specialized languages for linguistic programming. His areas of interest are natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and more precisely knowledge representation, machine learning, inferences and reasoning carried out by machines, and text semantic analysis (disambiguation, calculation of relations between phrases and terms). He is the inventor of the JeuxDeMots project and platform, the object of which is the creation of a large-scale knowledge base (several hundred million relationships).

Sara Tonelli – Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Dr. Sara Tonelli (https://dh.fbk.eu/people/profile/satonelli) is head of the Digital Humanities group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy. She holds a PhD in Language Sciences and, since the group was launched in 2013, she has been involved in several projects across IT and Humanities disciplines. Her main research areas are information extraction from text with a focus on events and frames, historical data processing, and digital cultural heritage. She is currently involved in the Odeuropa H2020 project, whose goal is to study European history by reconstructing its odours using Artificial Intelligence. In the project, she leads the activities related to multilingual extraction of olfactory information from historical documents. 

Mikel Forcada – University of Alicante

Prof. Mikel L. Forcada was born in Caracas (Venezuela) in 1963 and is married with two children. He graduated in Science in 1986 and got his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1991. Since 2002 he is full professor of Computer Languages and Systems at the Universitat d’Alacant. Prof. Forcada is president of the European Association for Machine Translation since 2015. From the turn of the millennium on, Prof. Forcada’s research interests have mainly focused on the field of translation technologies, but he has worked in fields as diverse as quantum chemistry, biotechnology, surface physics, machine learning (especially with neural networks) and automata theory. He is the author of more than 70 articles in international journals, papers in international conferences and book chapters, of which about 40 are about translation technologies. In 2004, after heading several publicly- and privately-funded projects on machine translation he started the free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium (with more than 40 language pairs), where he is a member of the project management committee after ten years being president, and the free/open-source software project Bitextor (which crawls Internet sites to harvest parallel corpora). He is also the co-founder of Prompsit Language Engineering (2006). Prof. Forcada has participated in the scientific committees of more than thirty international conferences and workshops. During 2009–2010 he was an ETS Walton Visiting Professor in the machine translation group at Dublin City University; during 2016–2017 he was visiting professor at Sheffield University and the University of Edinburgh.