15th Belgium NLP Meetup

Now that another COVID surge has come and gone, let's all meet again for an evening filled with NLP. Our 15th meetup will take place in the offices of InThePocket in Ghent, on Wednesday May 18th. Doors will open at 7pm and talks will start around 7.30pm, after which there's time for socializing.

Here's the program:

RobBERT: A Dutch RoBERTa-based Language Model
Pieter Delobelle, KU Leuven
Pre-trained language models have been dominating the field of natural language processing in recent years, and have led to significant performance gains for various complex natural language tasks. One of the most prominent pre-trained language models is BERT. Although the multilingual version of BERT performs well on many tasks, recent studies showed that BERT models trained on a single language significantly outperform the multilingual results. This presentation will talk about RobBERT, our Dutch model based on RoBERTa. We will discuss the training setup, finetuning of language models, and fairness considerations.

Smart Cities: from administration to application
Laurens Meeus and Alina Kramchaninova, CrossLang
In this talk, we will steer you through CEFAT4Cities. The aim of this project, funded by the Connecting Europe Facility programme of the European Commission, is to create a multilingual semantic layer allowing citizens across the EU to interact with public services in their own language. We transform natural-language administrative procedures into machine-readable data through a pipeline combining techniques like semantic networks and machine translation. This pipeline supports the development of applications such as chatbots.

Hey ML, Meet UX. Managing trust & Expectations between language models and users.
Remi Delanghe & Peter Vermaercke, In The Pocket
ML helps humans make faster and better decisions. ML models sometimes make strange predictions from a user's perspective, or the capabilities of a model are not always transparent. At ITP, we radically focus on user experience when we're building digital products. And as ML is empowering the next generation of digital products, we've been learning a lot about ML and User Experience over the last years, or how to build trust between humans and machines. In this talk, we'll first introduce you to the nuances of ML & UX. In the second half, we'll demonstrate a couple of internal NLP tools we've created to guide product decisions for our work at ITP.