The Stepstone Group at RANLP 2023

In the middle of my summer vacation, I took a detour to attend and present at the 14th RANLP Conference (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, https://ranlp.org/ranlp2023/ ) and to visit the beautiful city of Varna on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria.

With a history spanning over more than two decades, this important conference brings together NLP researchers and professionals from all over the world and offers them a forum for discussing the latest developments and innovations in NLP. What I liked very much was learning a lot about the advances in AI and ML, but also seeing the diversity and depth of contributions in some more traditional research fields such as phonetics, morphology, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, lexicography.

Our paper was just one of 140 accepted research papers this year, which will be published in the remarkable 1300-pages proceedings file (https://ranlp.org/ranlp2023/index.php/proceedings/).

The conference featured six distinguished keynote speakers, each renowned in their respective NLP subfields (https://ranlp.org/ranlp2023/index.php/keynote-speakers/). I love listening to keynote speeches and I never miss them at conferences! Good keynote speakers not only share insights into various aspects of their research, but also provide a human and empathetic perspective. They enrich their presentations with philosophical insights and remind us that the true essence of NLP lies not only in algorithms and data but also in its impact on the way we communicate and understand each other. So did the RANLP keynote speakers!

As expected, one of the most important topics was the advancement of AI, in particular the emergence of large generative models (ChatGPT, Bard, PaLM…). On the one hand, great admiration for the quality of LLMs was expressed (“Does God speak to them?”) and extensive research on how to use, adapt and improve them was presented. As the main directions in the “New NLP” researchers see making LLMs usable (prompt engineering, smaller and cheaper LLMs), scientific (understand how they do what they do), and useful (tune them to domains, tailor them for enterprise processing). On the other hand, many large-scale tests and analyses aim at finding errors and limits of LLMs (Do they “know” and “understand” numbers, facts, text?). In this context, the conference continued the global discussion on the potential risks and uncertainties associated with their use. Also, ethical questions were raised, with a strong emphasis on our ethical responsibility as researchers and professionals when dealing with the ‘all-powerful’ machine.

Unsurprisingly, not only the primary focus of some keynotes, but also of many of the submitted papers, revolved around the topics like bias and hate speech — how to detect them and how to effectively address and remove them from the digital landscape. Most researchers struggle with data scarcity, especially how to cover smaller languages, all sub-cultures, all biases… But nowadays it seems more difficult than ever to first define what is bias, what is hate speech, and then how to fairly annotate them (“Who decides? How many people does it require to call a text hate speech? The majority? A single person?”).

The main conference programme was organised in 12 parallel presentations sessions and two poster sessions, with topics such as Language Resources, Language Models, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Summarisation, Generation, and many more.

The Stepstone Group was represented with a contribution from the Linguistic Services Team. Our submitted paper outlined an automatic sentence generation pipeline, developed last year for the Stepstone Recruit project. Internally, we refer to it as “linguistic generation” serving as the backup to the AI-based sentence generation model created by the data scientists of the Novel Team.

Feel free to check out the paper as soon as the proceedings are published:

Vera Aleksic, Mona Brems, Anna Mathes, Theresa Bertele. 2023. Lexicon-driven automatic sentence generation for the skills section in a job posting. Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 32–40. Varna, Sep 4–6, 2023. https://doi.org/10.26615/978-954-452-092-2_004

Lastly, I believe that the organisers found it easy to plan a captivating social program and exciting excursions, by having the breathtaking backdrop of the Black Sea, the picturesque city of Varna, as well as many archaeological sites at their disposal. A place to visit again! 😊