Nicoletta Calzolari

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Language Technology Challenges at the Crossroads of Data, Language and Evaluation
Nicoletta Calzolari

Nicoletta Calzolari Zamorani is Research Associate and former Director of Research and Director (2003-08) of the Institute of Computational Linguistics-CNR, Pisa. She received an Honorary Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen and awarded the title of “ACL Fellow” in the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) Fellows founding group for “significant contributions to computational lexicography, and for the creation and dissemination of language resources”. She is coordinating international, European (recently the EC FLaReNet Network), national projects/strategic initiatives. She is President of ELRA (European Language Resources Association), Permanent member of ICCL, vice-president of META-TRUST, convener of the ISO Lexicon WG, president of the PAROLE Association, 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). She is General Chair of LREC (since 2004) and of COLING-ACL-2006. She was invited speaker, member of program committees, organiser of many international conferences/workshops. She is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal Language Resources and Evaluation, Springer. She is member of journal editorial/advisory boards. She has more than 400 publications.

Abstract of communication: 

Language Technology (LT) is a data-intensive field and major breakthroughs have stemmed from a better use of more and more Language Resources (LRs). The challenges ahead depend on a coherent strategy involving not only the best methods and technologies but also many LR related dimensions. One of these is evaluation. The major target will continue to be the problem of “understanding”: ours must become also a “knowledge-intensive” field. But 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 across modalities (social media data, but also visual and multimodal data) and the integration of text analytics methods with methods for dealing with other types of data, to capture the full potential not only of big data but also of the combination of different modalities and different semantic/pragmatic contexts. A critical point will be the adoption of consolidated methodologies and achievements (e.g. appropriate evaluation mechanisms and interoperability) of the LT/LR field also when working on different types of data.

The presentation will also highlight some policy issues that must be considered when making up a strategy for the future of the field: issues such as sharing resources and tools, adopting the paradigm of accumulation of knowledge and allowing replicability of research results.

Human Language Understanding
June 18
Keynote talk