October '25 Meetup: Munich🥨NLP x MCML

Begin of the event 6pm, Oettingenstrasse 67, Room 151 - in this link you find an overview of the rooms https://www.lmu.de/raumfinder/#/building/bw7070/map?room=707001151_ the room is the 1 OG in the middle between the F and E wings.

- 6:00 to 6:15pm: Open doors and welcome by MCML and Munich NLP

- 6:15 to 6:45pm: Verena Blaschke, PhD Student, LMU & MCML
Title of the talk : Bavarian NLP: How (and why) to process dialect data
Abstract: Natural language processing (NLP) has improved by leaps and bounds when it comes to processing data from standardized languages with plenty of available data, like German. However, NLP lags behind when closely related non-standard varieties are concerned, such as Bavarian dialects. I will give a brief overview of some of the challenges we face in dialect NLP: To start with, there is a general lack of high-quality data. On the technical side, subword tokenization methods sometimes struggle with ad-hoc pronunciation spellings, and evaluation metrics do not necessarily take into account linguistic variation. Furthermore, I argue that we should not only consider how to tackle dialectal variation in NLP, but also why, as the technology needs of dialect speakers can be different from those of standard language speakers.

- 6:45 to 7:15pm Jenya Sukhodolskaya, Developer Advocate, Qdrant
Title of the talk: miniCOIL: Sparse Neural Retrieval Done Right
Abstract: I’ll present miniCOIL, an attempt to make a sparse neural retriever as it should be: a lightweight exact matches-based retrieval model with semantical understanding, that is performant on out-of-domain data.

- 7:15pm: Networking with Food and Drinks

More info:
https://munich-nlp.com/october25-meetup/