4th Belgium NLP Meetup

We have a date, a location, and three speakers have confirmed their presence at the fourth Belgium NLP Meetup. After three successful stops in Leuven, Antwerp and Ghent, on Thursday November 16th we'll meet at VUB in Elsene for another evening of Natural Language Processing fun. We'll start the evening around 19h30 and hope to finish around 22h.

This is what we have in store:

• Did you also hear the news last summer that Facebook engineers "panicked" and had to "pull the plug" after their bots "developed their own language" (http://bgr.com/2017/07/31/facebook-ai-shutdown-language/)? Of course, no such thing really happened, but by the time the news was debunked (https://gizmodo.com/no-facebook-did-not-panic-and-shut-down-an-ai-program-1797414922), the rumours had spread far and wide. To better understand the whole affair, we invited Katrien Beuls from the VUB AI Lab ( http://ai.vub.ac.be/ ) to come and talk about how robots can really acquire linguistic intelligence.

• eRowz ( http://erowz.com/ ) is a young company from Enghien that collects millions of classifieds from around the web, organizes them, and makes them available through a search engine. Obviously, organizing all these product offers requires a considerable amount of Natural Language Processing. Vincent Vandegans and Denis Lebailly will tell us how eRowzuses NLP to analyze, classify and make accessible the millions of ads in their database.

• Together with University College Ghent, Faction XYZ ( https://www.faction.xyz/ ) evaluated the Dutch and French NLP models in the most popular software tools for chatbot developers: Facebook's wit.ai, Microsoft's LUIS, IBM's Watson,... Jos Polfliet will introduce us to the world of NLP for chatbots and present the results of this benchmark study.