News and Events: Projects and Awards

Projects and Awards

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  ERC Consolidator Grant awarded to Raquel Fernández

  We are pleased to announce that Raquel Fernández has been awarded an ERC Consolidator, to work on Distributed dynamic representations for dialogue management (DREAM).

  Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. Fernández will address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. Her model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates directly from experience. This constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning – that will break new scientific ground in (computational) linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Fernández will implement the agent as an artificial neural network system and train it with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information, leading to more human-like and effective communication.

  For more information, see https://erc.europa.eu/node/1344 or contact Raquel Fernández at raquel.fernandez at uva.nl.

• Florian Speelman wins Andreas Bonn medal 2018

  The GNGH, the Dutch Society for the Advancement of Science, Medicine and Surgery, awarded the Andreas Bonn medals 2018 to Florian Speelman (CWI and QuSoft), Remco Molenaar (AMC) and Edwin van der Pol (AMC) on 16 November 2018. The Andreas Bonn medals are presented once every five years for original work in the scientific fields of Natural Sciences, Physical Sciences and Medicine & Dentistry, for PhD defences that took place at the UvA or VU University Amsterdam. Besides the medal, the winners received 1000 euro. A total of 18 young researchers were nominated for the prize.
  For more information, see http://gngh.uva.nl/content/nieuws/2018/11/uitreiking-andreas-bonn-medailles-2018.html.

• Best paper award for Dieuwke Hupkes and Jelle Zuidema together with MAI students at BlackboxNLP Workshop

  Dieuwke Hupkes and Jelle Zuidema together with MAI students receive a best paper award at the BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and interpreting neural networks for NLP for their paper entitled "Under the Hood: Using Diagnostic Classifiers to Investigate and Improve how Language Models Track Agreement Information.

  For more information, see https://blackboxnlp.github.io/ or contact Jelle Zuidema at W.H.Zuidema at uva.nl.