14th Belgium NLP Meetup

Now that our social lives are slowly returning, it's time to bring back the Belgium NLP Meetups. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing you all again, this time in the offices of TechWolf in Ghent, on Tuesday November 16th. In case you've forgotten what our meetups are like: doors will open at 7pm, from 7.30pm we have three NLP-focused talks, after which there's time for socializing. TechWolf has kindly agreed to provide pizzas and drinks for the hungry and thirsty.

Please note:

• The covid safe ticket is required for the event.
• Pizzas will arrive shortly after the doors open at 7pm.

Here is the program for the evening:

JobBERT: Understanding Job Titles through Skills
Jens-Joris Decorte, TechWolf
Job titles form a cornerstone of many HR processes, and modeling them with high accuracy can greatly benefit many HR tech applications. In his talk, Jens-Joris will introduce a neural representation model for job
titles, which combines a pre-trained language model with co-occurrence
information from skill labels extracted from vacancies.

Implementing Transformer Models for NLP
Niels Rogge, Hugging Face
After the meteoric rise of their open-source Transformers library, Hugging Face hardly needs an introduction. Niels, machine learning engineer at the company, will talk about the Hugging Face ecosystem and discuss some of the open-source transformer models for NLP he has helped add to the Transformers library, such as TAPAS by Google AI and LayoutLM by Microsoft Research.

All we need is a transformer, but what does our transformer need?
Vignesh Baskaran
Bob has to solve a new NLP task at work. After a few days of hard effort, he ends up training a beautiful transformer model, which achieves state-of-the-art performance. He is super happy and sets up a meeting with the team to show off his results. Unfortunately, the next morning he realizes he forgot to save the model. He quickly retrains it with the same script, only to find the performance is... terrible! In his talk, Vignesh will discuss how state-of-the-art models can disappoint when they are retrained.

How to reach the TechWolf Headquarters?
TechWolf's address is Overzet 14b, 9000 Ghent, but the office is a bit hidden. You will find it at the back of bathroom supply store 'Van Marcke', diagonally across sports club 'Lean' and around the corner of 'Woody'. The office entrance is the leftmost door, which has the TechWolf logo. On the evening of the meetup, we'll make sure you can find us — for example, by placing a large branded flag.

• By car: If you come by car, the easiest option is to turn into 'Overzet' (the street between BelChicken and Frituur Einde Were), where you can enter the car park. This is a public car park, which costs €3 for 24 hours. If you arrive after 7 pm, it's free.
• By public transport: If you arrive with public transport, you can choose the tram or bus. From Gent-Sint-Pieters train station, buses 9, 14, 15 or 67 will take you to the TechWolf office. You should get off at bus stop 'Overzet'. If you prefer the tram, you can choose tram 2 'Zwijnaarde-Melle Leeuw' or tram 4 'Ledeberg'. The tram stop is called 'Bernard Spaelaan'. Please note that from this stop you have to walk around 13 minutes to reach TechWolf.
• By bike: The easiest way to travel in Ghent is by bike. You can just enter the car park and leave your bicycle close to the office entrance.