Projects and Awards

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  Best paper award at Coling 2020 for Bryan Eikema and Wilker Aziz

  Bryan Eikema and Wilker Aziz won the best paper award at Coling 2020 for their work on the inadequacy of the mode in neural machine translation. The paper is freely available on the ACL anthology and a link to Bryan's presentation will be there soon.

  For more information, see https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.coling-main.398/ or contact Bryan Eikema at b.eikema at uva.nl.
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  Amsterdam Data Science MSc Thesis Awards for two ILLC researchers

  Rochelle Choenni and Mario Giulianelli, both of them PhD candidates at the ILLC, were the winners of the Amsterdam Data Science MSc Thesis Awards 2020. Rochelle wrote her MSc AI thesis on the interpretation of multilingual sentence encoders, supervised by Katia Shutova. Mario's MSc AI thesis, supervised by Raquel Fernández, deals with the detection and analysis of lexical semantic change. Congratulations!

  For more information, see https://amsterdamdatascience.nl/events/thesis-awards/.
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  Prize at a NeuroIPS 2020 competition for Ekaterina Shutova and her students

  Nithin Holla, Phillip Lippe, Shantanu Chandra and Ekaterina Shutova have been awarded a prize at NeuroIPS 2020 Hateful Memes Challenge. The competition focused on the identification of offensive and discriminatory memes online, and solving this task required joint modelling of linguistic and visual properties of the meme. Ekaterina and her students developed a novel multimodal approach to this task, and their solution was amonsts the top 5 winning teams. For more information about the Challenge see: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/hateful-memes-challenge-winners. The full paper will be coming out shortly.

  For more information, see https://ai.facebook.com/blog/hateful-memes-challenge-winners or contact Ekaterina Shutova at e.shutova at uva.nl.
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  Journal Article Prize goes to Karlijn Roex

  Karlijn Roex, postdoctoral researcher at the ILLC, was awarded the 2020 Journal Article Prize by the Society of Friends and Former Associates of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in November. She received the prize for the article “Attitudes Towards Income Inequality: ‘Winners’ versus ‘Losers’ of the Perceived Meritocracy”, which was co-authored by Tim Huijts and Inge Sieben and published in 2019 in the journal Acta Sociologica. The prize goes to the best article by an MPIfG researcher in a peer-reviewed journal. Roex was a doctoral student at the International International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE) from 2014 to 2018.

  For more information, see https://www.mpifg.de/aktuelles/nachrichten_en.asp#938 or contact Gudrun Löhrer at loehrer at mpifg.de.
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  Three ILLC members involved in NWA-ORC grant awarded by NWO

  We are pleased to announce that Jelle Zuidema (ILLC), Ashley Burgoyne (ILLC) and Tom Lentz (ILLC) are involved in the NWA-ORC grant that was awarded by NWO. The name of the project is Opening the Black Box of Deep Learning for Language, Speech and Music and will be carried out by a consortium consisting of University of Amsterdam, Tilburg University, University of Groningen, VU Amsterdam, Radboud University, Textkernel, Floodtags, GlobalTextware, TNO, KPN, Deloitte, Algent, Chordify, Stichting Open Spraaktechnologie, Waag, muZIEum, Huggingface.

  For more information, see https://www.nwo.nl/en/researchprogrammes/toekenningen-nwa-orc/awards-nwa-orc-2019 or contact Jelle Zuidema at W.H.Zuidema at uva.nl.
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  Jeroen Smid receives NWO Veni

  We are pleased to announce that Jeroen Smid (ILLC) has been awarded an NWO Veni for his proposal entitled "Because of this part…".

  For more information, see https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2020/11/veni-grants-for-26-uva-and-amsterdam-umc-researchers.html or contact Jeroen Smid at jeroen.smid at fil.lu.se.