September Meetup: A New Start

We're back!

Building on the tremendous success of our inaugural meetup in April (https://www.meetup.com/DC-NLP/events/112139942/) (cross-listed with our friends at Data Science DC (https://www.meetup.com/Data-Science-DC/events/109386702/)), we're ready to strike out on our own and start holding regular monthly meetups. We've recently made arrangements with the great folks at Stetsons Famous Bar & Grill (http://stetsons-dc.com/index.php) in Adams Morgan to host our meetups in their upstairs bar on the second Wednesday of each month. We're truly excited to see you all again and will kick things off with a great set of presentations.

In September, we'll hear three 20-minute talks on various NLP topics:

• Many of our new members are just getting started in natural language processing and have indicated an interest in learning some of the basics. Charlie Greenbacker (https://twitter.com/greenbacker), Principal Data Scientist at Berico Technologies (http://www.bericotechnologies.com/), will provide a "crash course" in NLP techniques and applications.

• Ben Johnson (https://twitter.com/BenJohnsonNLP) is a co-founder of OpenWIMs.org (http://openwims.org/) – a set of standards and implementations of knowledge-based and stochastic semantic text analyzers. Ben will briefly describe the OpenWIMs system and give a demo of the latest OpenWIMs build.

• Valerie Coffman (https://twitter.com/valerierose) is the founder of Feastie.com (http://www.feastie.com/), a search engine for recipes from food blogs, and currently a developer and data scientist working with Synapsify (http://gosynapsify.com/). She will present the unique text analytics methods used by Synapsify to measure quality and themes in writing.

We'll meet at 6:30pm in the upstairs bar at Stetsons near the intersection of 16th and U Streets NW in Adams Morgan. Introductions & announcements will start around 7:00pm, and presentations will begin at 7:30pm. Afterwards, there'll be plenty of time for follow-up questions, networking, and drinks.

Please note: Stetsons is a 21 and over venue.

DC NLP meets on the second Wednesday of each month to network, socialize, and learn about the interesting work folks are doing in natural language processing, computational linguistics, text analytics, and more.

Do you have something you'd like to share with the group? Let us know! We're always looking for speakers to give talks at future meetups, and don't forget to follow @DCNLP (https://twitter.com/DCNLP/) on Twitter!