July meetup at Accentures

TIRED OF THE WORLD CUP!?

On a world cup break day, join us for an evening of talks, nibbles and networking hosted by our good friends at Accenture.

The programme will start with an introduction by Dr. Loizos Markides from Accenture.

The programme will feature two main talks:

1. Dr. Marco Bonanzini, consultant (author of "Mastering Social Media Mining with Python")

Title: Understanding Natural Language using Word Vectors (and Python)

Abstract:
This talk is an introduction to word vectors, a.k.a. word embeddings,
a family of Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms
where words are mapped to vectors.

An important property of these vector is being able to capture semantic
relationships, for example:
UK - London + Dublin = ???

These techniques have been driving important improvements in many NLP
applications over the past few years, so the interest around word
embeddings is spreading. In this talk, we'll discuss the basic
linguistic intuitions behind word embeddings, we'll compare some of the
most popular word embedding approaches, from word2vec to fastText, and
we'll showcase their use with Python libraries.

The aim of the talk is to be approachable for beginners,
so the theory is kept to a minimum.

By attending this talk, you'll be able to learn:

• the core features of word embeddings
• how to choose between different word embedding algorithms
• how to implement word embedding techniques in Python

2. Dr. Mahmoud El-Haj, Lancaster University

Title: Financial Narrative Processing

Abstract: This talk highlights the importance of automatic extraction and textual analysis of financial disclosures for their contribution to corporate success. Textual disclosures help to clarify issues obscured by complex accounting methods, contextualise financial results and summarise key elements of business activity that are difficult to quantify. The extraction and textual analysis of these disclosures combine with natural language processing and corpus linguistics to form the Financial Narrative Processing (FNP).

PS guests will need to sign in on entry as visitors. (PLEASE BRING A VALID ID)

There will be space for some lightning talks, so if you are interested just send us an email or message on Meetup.