— Minh Le and Antske Fokkens’ paper accepted for EACL 2017

Title: Tackling Error Propagation through Reinforcement Learning: A Case of Greedy Dependency Parsing Conference: EACL 2017 (European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics), at Valencia, 3-7 April 2017. Tackling Error Propagation through Reinforcement Learning: A Case of Greedy Dependency Parsing by Minh Le and Antske Fokkens Abstract: Error propagation is a common problem in READ MORE

— In the media: Will Artificial Intelligence learn to be biased?

Last week Motherboard published an article featuring a paper by PhD student Emiel van Miltenburg. (Later also published by the Dutch Motherboard.) Van Miltenburg found that the data that is commonly used to train automatic image description systems contain stereotypes and biases, leading to the question whether computers will be biased, too. Illustration from Stereotyping READ MORE

— An AlphaGo for Natural Language?

An AlphaGo for Natural Language? By Minh Le In October 2015, AlphaGo played its first winning games against a professional Go player. After the Nature article was published and the $1 million bet against Lee Sedol was proposed, Go players around the world have studied the matches extensively to speculate about the coming matches. The consensus READ MORE

— VU University scientists cluster National Research Agenda

Led by Piek Vossen, a group of scientists at VU University automatically divided 11,700 questions from NWO’s National Research Agenda into clusters. On the basis of language technology and mathematical equations of the most important words, slightly over 60 clusters of questions were found which at their turn were classified in a few hundred sub-clusters. READ MORE

— Mar. 13 2015: Why linguists are needed by George Lakoff — webcast available

Webcast available of presentation by George Lakoff on Friday March 13 2015 “Why linguists are needed: The severe limitations of big data analysis of linguistic corpora” arguing that “big data statistical methods by themselves were hopeless” in a multi-million dollar project on analyzing the conceptual metaphors in a vast corpus of US intelligence documents. George READ MORE

— NLP analysis of “The art of the Humanities – Graduation day 2014”

Introduction For every master student, there is one thing standing in between them and the end of their student life: “the thesis”. For months, or even years, a student tries to analyse a certain topic in the best way possible. And after this long and difficult journey, the student receives his reward at his graduation: READ MORE