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Belgium NLP Kickoff Meetup

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Hosted By
Yves P.
Belgium NLP Kickoff Meetup

Details

Schedule

We will kick off the series of Belgium Natural Language Processing meetups in Leuven on December 7th, 2016. Four speakers from industry and academia will share their experiences and expertise:

• (Big) Business with NLP: dream or reality?Geert Adriaens, Dekimo Experts
In his talk, Geert will zoom in on the business aspects of Natural Language Processing: is there a market for NLP? What is its size? Where is the money? What are the challenges when we bring these technologies to the market? Who are the players (big and small)? What are the pitfalls for companies venturing into NLP products and services? What are the lessons learnt from experiences over the last 70 years of commercialization of the technologies? What are the opportunities in the current era of big data and multiple "Siri-like" offerings?

• The future of translation technology: shaken or stirred ?Vincent Vandeghinste & Tom Vanallemeersch, Centre for Computational Linguistics, KULeuven
Ever since the advent of modern computers, researchers have designed a kaleidoscope of strategies to automate the translation of natural language, some of which led to the appearance of systems in production environments. In the last few decades, the move from linguistic to stochastic strategies has sped up the development cycle and made automatic translation widely accessible. More recently, different types of strategies are being blended. Apart from automatic translation, translation technology encompasses commercial programs like translation memory systems, which are technically simpler, yet highly popular among professional translators. Such systems are also added to the blend. In this talk, Vincent and Tom will serve you some single malts, blends, and hot topics in translation technology. From there, they will imagine what a future cocktail menu may look like, and give you the opportunity to add some spice.

• Natural Language Understanding in E-CommerceDirk Stevens, Enquire.ai
Dirk Stevens is co-founder of Enquire. He will take us through his journey from idea to reality, how he approached R&D, is addressing market needs and is building his company. In the second part he will talk about Enquire's flag ship product "Ask", and how Ask helps visitors find products in web shops. He'll give us a glimpse into the future and talk about Enquire's latest R&D and his vision of how natural language will change the way we live and do business.

Location

The meetup will take place at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Leuven, conveniently located in the centre of Leuven.

• If you travel by train, leave the station by the front entrance and follow Maria Theresiastraat for 500m. The Faculty of Arts is located between Bogaardenstraat and Blijde-Inkomststraat. The Mgr. Sencie Instituut is at the far side of the faculty, to your left.

• If you come by car, take Blijde Inkomststraat and park your car in the underground parking garage at Monseigneur Ladeuzeplein. The Mgr. Sencie Instituut is located behind the university's Central Library.

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Belgium NLP Meetup
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