Spark/NLP 2-4-1 Edition

For this event, we are trying something new: We are teaming up with the Dublin Spark meetup and are jointly organizing an event!

In addition, we are really happy to be hosted again by Nitro who hosted us for our very first and our seventh event!

IMPORTANT: You have to sign up for this event at the Dublin Spark event page (https://www.meetup.com/Dublin-Spark-Meetup/events/243875410/).

We will have two great talks, one about Spark and the IoT and the other one focused on NLP and discourse. In addition, as usual, we will have food, drinks, and opportunities for networking and discussions not only with fellow NLPers, but also with the Spark community.

You can find the full details for the talks below:

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Akmal Chaudhri, GridGain

Apache Spark and Apache Ignite: Where Fast Data Meets the IoT

Abstract: It is not enough to build a mesh of sensors or embedded devices to obtain more insights about the surrounding environment and optimize your production systems. Usually, your IoT solution needs to be capable of transferring enormous amounts of data to storage or the cloud where the data have to be processed further. Quite often, the processing of the endless streams of data has to be done in real-time so that you can react on the IoT subsystem's state accordingly.

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Yufang Hou, IBM

Information Status: Tasks, Datasets and Models

Abstract: Information status (IS henceforth) describes the degree to which a discourse entity is available to the hearer regarding the speaker’s assumption aboutthe hearer’s knowledge and beliefs. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of research work on IS, including NLP tasks and datasets. Then I will focus on one subtask (i.e., fine-grained IS classification) and talk about two models which we developed recently for this task.