About this workshop

To celebrate 40 years of Computational Linguistics at the University of Essex, colleagues and alumni are gathering for a weekend in July to catchup with old friends and to make new ones. There are talks planned for Saturday and Sunday morning, along with poster presentations during the breaks.

There will be a drinks reception on Friday evening to welcome everyone back to Essex and dinner planned for Saturday night.

Registration

The event is free; however, you will need to pay for the dinner on Saturday night if you join us (expected to be £35 per head).

Please register for the event using this form.

Local Information

• Travelling to the University of Essex (Colchester Campus)
• Accommodation: The Wivenhoe House Hotel offer participants of the workshop a special rate, please contact WHH bookings, quoting the name of the conference to take advantage of the special rates.

The above rates are based on bed and breakfast, there are also Suites and Luxury Suites available at a supplement.

Programme

Friday July 8th (Location: Network Building Foyer)

• 18:00 Drinks reception

Saturday July 9th (Location: Essex Business School 2.34)

• 9:15 Introduction to the event

• 9:30 Doug Arnold – 40 years of CL at Essex

• 10:15 ‘The founders' - Part 1: Yorick Wilks - Speak, memory

• 11:00 Coffee break

• 11:30 Intro (everybody introduces himself for a minute or so, with or without slides)

• 12:00-13:00 ‘Essexians made good' - Part 1
  • 12:00 Mike Rosner - Reflections on Dialogue Systems
  • 12:15 Patrick Hanks - Words are ambiguous, but patterns are unambiguous
  • 12:30 Claire Grover - Geo-locating Historical Texts
  • 12:45 Anne de Roeck - Nocuous Ambiguity, or "I never said half the things [you thought] I said

• 13:00 Lunch

• 14:30 'The founders' - Part 2: Ray Turner. Semantics of Mathematical Languages.

• 15:15-16:00 'Essexians made good’ - Part 2
  • 15:15 Valia Kordoni - Starting off from Essex: CL/LT Education and Research in Europe and Beyond
  • 15:30 Josef van Genabith - Linguists' and Engineers' Views on Machine Translation
  • 15:45 Aline Villavicencio - Distributional Semantic Models, Word Embeddings and other Multiword Expressions

• 16:00 Fishbowl

• 16:20 Coffee break

• 16:45-17:30 ‘Essexians made good 3’ (and coming to the present)
  • 16:45 Dyaa Albakour - Anecdotes of IR research in academia and industry
  • 17:00 Mahmoud El-Haj - Financial Narrative Processing: a Corpus-based NLP approach
  • 17:15 Sonja Eisenbeiss, Massimo Poesio - Child-Directed Speech in the BabyExp corpus

• 17:30 End of day

• Dinner at the Gurkha, a Nepalese restaurant in Colchester new town

Sunday July 10th (Location: Essex Business School 2.34)

• 10:00 'The founders' - Part 3: Stephen Pulman. Linguistics and Computational Linguistics

• 10:45-11:15 'Essex CL now' - Part 1
  • 10:45 Massimo Poesio - The Language and Computation Group at present: people and projects
  • 11:00 Udo Kruschwitz - From Search to Adaptive Search

• 11:15 Coffee break

• 11:45-12:45 'Essex CL now’ - Part 2
  • 11:45 Annie Louis - Context-based Models of Social Media Conversations
  • 12:00 Mijail Kabadjov - Online Forums: old problems, new perspectives
  • 12:15 Silviu Paun - Modeling Text Using Subsets of Topics
  • 12:30 Miguel Martinez - SIGNAL: Finding insight in the world’s news

• 12:45 End of the program

• 1:30 Informal lunch