2ND SPINOZA WORKSHOP: “LOOKING AT THE LONG TAIL”

*** Slides from the invited talks:

Introduction

Maarten de Rijke

Antal van den Bosch

Johan Bos

Ivan Titov

Eduard Hovy

Stefan Schlobach

*** Videos of all presentations are available online now!! Check the playlist:

Many natural phenomena show a Zipfian distribution (Newman, 2005), in which a small amount of observations are very frequent and there is a very long tail of low frequent observations. The distribution of symbols in natural language and their meanings are no exception to Zipf’s law. Within a language community and a period of time, e.g. a generation, a few expressions are extremely frequent and are used in their most frequent meaning, whereas there are many expressions and meanings that we find rarely. This has big consequences for the computer models that are built from these observations: they tend to suffer from overfitting to the most frequent cases. As long as the tasks on which we test these models also show the same distribution, these models perform quite well. However, this favours models that tend to rely on statistical obvious cases and it does not require very deep understanding or reasoning. Typically, their performance is high when the test cases match the most frequent cases, and very low when they belong to the long tail. Interestingly enough, people do not suffer from overfitting in the same way as machines do. They can perfectly handle long tail phenomena as well. In this workshop, we want to address the long tail in the semantic processing of text with a focus on the task of disambiguation. We need to find an incentive for the community to consider the long tail as a first-class citizen, either through integrating it into evaluation metrics, and/or representing the long tail world into the (evaluation) datasets and knowledge bases. This would encourage the development of systems that have a better understanding of natural language and are able to deal with knowledge and data sparseness.

Aim of the Workshop

The goal of the current Long Tail workshop is to discuss the starting points and motivation for a future workshop and task, as well as the design, the data, evaluation and possible systems with a selection of experts in the field. Depending on the outcome of the Spinoza “Long Tail” workshop, we will also consider a special issue journal publication together with the workshop speakers. We plan to build upon the results of this workshop by creating a disambiguation task which has a strong focus on the long tail phenomenon. Such a task requires the design and collection of the data that represent the long tail, as well as adequate evaluation methods. We aim to propose this task as a “Long Tail Shared Disambiguation Task” to the next call for SemEval-2018 tasks, which is expected late 2016/early 2017. In addition, we plan to propose a workshop for ACL 2017, which will be dedicated to interest the community in the task, discuss the acquisition of the data and explore possible systems that would optimize for this task.

Structure of the Workshop

The 2nd Spinoza Workshop “Looking at the Long Tail” will consist of two main sessions:

1. Invited Speakers

The invited speakers span from various fields of expertise:

  • Natural Language Processing
  • Information Retrieval
  • Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
  • Machine Learning

They will address the phenomena of overfitting and low long-tail performance from their own disciplines.

2. Datathon

The practical session is organized as a datathon and will consist of four tracks:

As a starting point, we will provide a collection of evaluation methods, data sets, knowledge bases, and system results for this datathon to analyse and discuss. We also provide scripts for data analysis.

Programme

From To
Welcome 09:00 09:30
PART I: INVITED SPEAKERS
Introduction by the Organizers 09:30 10:05
10:05 10:30
10:30 10:55
Coffee Break 10:55 11:10
11:10 11:35
11:35 12:00
12:00 12:25
Lunch 12:25 13:25
13:25 14:05
PART II: DATATHON
Introduction to the Datathon tracks 14:05 14:15
Discussion & Brainstorming 14:15 14:45
Hands-on 14:45 16:05
Coffee Break 16:05 16:20
Conclusions 16:20 17:05
Central Presentations 17:05 17:45
WRAP-UP
Towards a SemEval ’18 Shared Task 17:45 18:00
Drinks 18:00

Related research

Communication

We encourage to join and use the following email address for all communication related to the workshop: spinoza-workshop-looking-at-the-long-tail@googlegroups.com

And, let us know about your impressions and find out about others’ on Twitter, using the official hashtag of the workshop: #SpinozaLongTail !

Directions to the Workshop venue

Room: Forum 2 at Floor 1, Wing D
Main building Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam

You might use this link: How to get to Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Route from entrance Main Building VU University follow signs: ‘Forum, Wing D’

Take the stairs (indicated by signpost) to Floor 1.
Forum 2 is the first room on your right.
When you arrive at the Main Building VU and would like assistance, please ask a host in the hall near the main entrance.

Can not make it?

For people that can not attend this workshop, we aim to broadcast the event LIVE. Pictures and videos will also be taken during the event, and published shortly after it.

Acknowledgements

The research for this project was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) via the Spinoza fund.

Organizing Committee

  1. Piek Vossen (p.t.j.m.vossen@vu.nl)
  2. Filip Ilievski (f.ilievski@vu.nl)
  3. Marten Postma (m.c.postma@vu.nl)
  4. Selene Kolman (s.j.j.kolman@vu.nl)