18th Belgium NLP Meetup

On May 9th, the Belgium NLP Meetup returns to Ghent for its 18th edition. We'll meet in the office of TechWolf, where Ekaterina L. will tell us how she uses NLP to combat Russian state propaganda, Jens-Joris Decorte will discuss how TechWolf extracts skills from unstructured documents, and Tiebe Parmentier will show how Tekst.ai boosts customer support with NLP. Doors open at 7pm, talks will start around 7.30pm.

Below are the first two abstracts for the evening. The third will follow soon.

NLP Against Russian State Propaganda
Ekaterina L.
If you google "propaganda and internet freedom," you will find mentions of Russian state media among the first 5 results. Large-scale disinformation campaigns are their trademark, supported by troll factories like the Internet Research Agency, notorious for its involvement in the U.S. elections. They prime public opinion for warmongering political strategies that affect millions of people. For this reason, the NLP community has begun to pay more attention to combating censorship, disinformation, and propaganda. I will present ongoing research and development efforts by Russian-speaking volunteers on the following topics, with focus on Russia-Ukraine war: detecting and mitigating militaristic propaganda, detecting political hate speech and trolling, analysing propaganda narratives.

Privacy-Preserving NLP: Safeguarding sensitive data
**Tiebe Parmentier, Tekst.ai**
It is often said that data is the new oil, and organizations rely on NLP to gather insights from sensitive information. With data and privacy breaches, it is important to make sure that this data is used safely. In this talk, we will look at techniques that make it possible to preserve the privacy of sensitive data such as financial or health data. We will explore both AI and non-AI-based techniques such as differential privacy, federated learning, and data anonymization methods, that make it possible to work with sensitive data. By the end of this talk, we hope you go home with a clear understanding of some best practices for keeping data safe, and how Tekst.ai has implemented them in its products and services.

From text to skills: an NLP journey
Jens-Joris Decorte, TechWolf
In this talk, we will highlight how recent advancements in NLP are put into practice at TechWolf, to transform unstructured documents into valuable, fine-grained information about the skills present within world-class organizations. We will cover academic advances in this field and the practical usage of these techniques in an industrial setting.