Nicoletta Calzolari Zamorani

ILC-CNR, Pisa (Italy)

Biography

Research Associate and former Director of Research and Director of the CNR Institute of Computational Linguistics, Pisa, Italy. Received an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen “for her significant contribution to the field of Computational Linguistics”. Awarded the title “ACL Fellow” for “significant contributions to computational lexicography, and for the creation and dissemination of language resources” in the founding group of the ACL Fellows program of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Coordinated many international/European/national projects/strategic initiatives.

President of ELRA (European Language Resources Association), permanent member of ICCL, chair of ISO/TC 37/SC 4, vice-president of META-TRUST, member of the Board of UNDL Foundation (Universal Networking Digital Language Foundation), member of the Advisory Board of LIDER (Linked Data as an enabler of cross-media and multilingual content analytics for enterprises across Europe), committee member of ISO/TC 37/AG 0, president of the PAROLE Association, former convenor of the ISO Lexicon WG, former chair of the Scientific Board of CLARIN, former member of the ACL Exec, of the META-NET Council, of the ESFRI Social Sciences and Humanities Working Group, and of many International Committees and Advisory Boards (e.g., ELSNET, SENSEVAL, ECOR, SIGLEX).

General Chair of LREC (since 2004), of COLING 2016 and COLING-ACL-2006. Invited speaker, member of program committees, organiser of many international conferences/workshops. Co-editor-in-chief of the Journal Language Resources and Evaluation, Springer. Member of journal editorial/advisory boards. More than 400 publications.

An Excursus through Policy Issues - at the Crossroads of Data, Language Resources and Infrastructure

I will highlight the importance of policy issues for the future of Language Technology (LT): issues such as standardisation, sharing resources, services and tools, adopting the paradigm of accumulation of knowledge and promoting replicability of research results. The challenges ahead depend on a coherent strategy involving not only the best methods and technologies but also policy dimensions.

LT is a “data-intensive” field and major breakthroughs stemmed from the use of large Language Resources (LRs). It must become also a “knowledge-intensive” field. The next frontier will focus not only on text or multilingualism but also around the concurrent use of different types of data, across sectors and modalities (social media, and visual and multimodal data) and the integration of text analytics with methods for capturing the full potential of the combination of various modalities and different semantic/pragmatic contexts. A critical point will be the adoption of consolidated methodologies of the LT/LR field (e.g. appropriate evaluation and interoperability) also when working on different types of data.

In the paradigm of open language infrastructures based on sharing LRs, services and tools, a way for LT to achieve the status of a mature science lies in initiatives enabling to join forces both in the creation of large LR pools and in big collaborative experiments using these LRs. This will enable building on each other achievements, integrating results (also with Linked Data). This cannot be achieved without standardisation efforts. I will point at current initiatives within ISO with respect to standardising LRs.

This requires also an effort towards a culture of “service to the community” where everyone has to contribute. This “cultural change” is not a minor issue. I will mention how initiatives like the LRE Map, Share your LRs, ISLRN, are steps towards promoting the concept of Open Science, highlighting the role of ELRA and LREC in pushing towards this vision.

See our other confirmed keynote speakers:

  • António Branco (University of Lisbon)
  • Michael McTear (University of Ulster)
  • David Pérez Fernández (Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism)
  • German Rigau (University of the Basque Country)
  • Hans Uszkoreit (Saarland University, DFKI Language Technology Lab)
  • Philippe Wacker (LT-Innovate)
  • Jason D. Williams (Microsoft Research)
  • Venue

    The event will be held at the University of Seville.

    Important dates

    Take a look to important dates here.

    Contact

    General information about this event: fetlt at us dot es.