Report of YRSNLP 2016

YRSNLP 2016 was successfully held on Dec. 10th at Osaka International Convention Center.

We welcomed 83 participants in total, among them 21 are from outside Japan.

The symposium was started with 4 invited talks given by active researchers. Topics broadly covered NLP area.

You may find the detailed program here.

The first speaker was Dr. Karl Stratos from Bloomberg, talked about "Lessons from Working on Spectral Learning and Neural Networks."

Slides are available here.

The second invited talk was given by Professor Graham Neubig from CMU, talked about "Structured Neural Networks for NLP: From Idea to Code" with interactive coding.

Slides and codes are shared at github.

After lunch break, Professor Barbara Plank from University of Groningen talked about "Variety in research, research in variety."

By the way, Professor Plank won the best paper runner-up award at COLING 2016. Congratulations, Professor Plank!

Slides are shared at her web site.

The final speaker was Professor Yang Liu from Tsinghua University. He introduced "Recent Advances in Neural Machine Translation."

He also delivered strong encourages to young researchers.

Slides are here.

After these invited talks, we had two company presentations by NEC-AIST AI Cooperative Research Laboratory and NEXT Co., Ltd.

Following flush talks, a poster session hosting 15 poster presentations had began.

Enthusiastic discussions (figuratively and literally) warmed the room!

We believe the symposium was great opportunity for participants to build and strengthen their international networks.

As this is the first attempt and was held in Japan, PC members of Wakate-no-kai organized the event.

We plan to invite international PC members in the next symposium, and hope to have more international participants!