SwissText 2021 — NLP conference in Switzerland
The Swiss Text Analytics Conference, June 14–15–16, 2021
Switzerland is a small country, but counts 12 universities and 8 universities of applied sciences. This implies a lof of researchers and a ton of research done.The fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are in vogue, in the research world of course, but also in companies in Switzerland and elsewhere. Large companies have been taking the lead for several years, but for some time now these technologies have been infiltrating even small and medium-sized companies (SMEs).
Therefore, it makes sense to have a conference dedicated to these topics, in order to highlight the research done in Switzerland, but also to encourage the transfer of these technologies in the industry.
Introducing SwissText
This conference is called SwissText and the 6th edition is happening soon, more exactly from 14 to 16 June 2021. For the second time, the conference will be held online.
SwissText is an annual conference that brings together text analytics experts from industry and academia. It is organised by the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing (SwissNLP) in collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) as well as the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and the data innovation alliance. SwissText 2021 is part of the Networking Event Series — Natural Language Processing funded by InnoSuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency. It is supported by more than 10 universities and scientific associations. — Source: https://www.swisstext.org
The conference is composed of 4 main tracks, namely:
- The Applied Track: Focus on Swiss technology and its application in the industry. Where experts from academia and industry meet (17 papers).
- The Scientific Track: More technical research, done by international researchers (7 papers).
- The Demo Track: A way to showcase projects and prototypes (5 demos).
- The Highlights Track: A handpicked selection of high quality papers presented in top NLP conferences in the past year.
And there is more than the official tracks, because the conference features workshops and shared tasks. There are 3 shared tasks and 3 workshops:
- Task 1: Text Normalization for Swiss German
- Task 2: Sentence End and Punctuation Prediction in NLG Text
- Task 3: Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text
- Workshop 1: The European Language Grid
- Workshop 2: NLP efforts against COVID-19 in Switzerland
- Workshop 3: NLP in Finance
As you can see, the topics are oriented on the challenges brought by the linguistic diversity in Switzerland, on important current events as well as on societal issues, and the important and impactful advances in the NLP world.
The preliminary version of the program can be found here: https://www.swisstext.org/program
Each year, the conference highlights high quality researchers to give a keynote presentation. The 2021 edition features 3 experts:
- Sebastian Welter — AI Lead Architect at Accenture
- Lucia Specia — Professor of NLP at Imperial College London
- Lluís Màrquez — Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Research in Barcelona
For more info about them and the conference in general, please check the official website: https://swisstext.org
As a side note, I’d say that the HumanTech Institute of the HES-SO Fribourg is proud to be a partner of the conference for the second year.
We really appreciate the way the conference is going. It is very professionally organized and the content is always interesting. Therefore, we really look forward to this year edition of the conference!
The registration is now open and the tickets are very affordable since it’s an online conference. Early-bird tickets are open until May 5, then the regular price apply.
Get your ticket now at https://www.swisstext.org/registration!
If you plan to attend, I’ll be happy to discuss with you about any NLP topic. Have a nice day, and see you there the 14–15–16 of June!
Jacky Casas
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