Speakers

Ife Adebara is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Systems Program at the Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia (UBC). She is a member of the Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing Group, working under the supervision of Professor Abdul Mageed. Ife is currently a UBC Public Scholar and an associate member of the African Languages Technology Initiative (ALT-i) in Nigeria. For her PhD dissertation, Ife is developing deep learning technologies for African Languages and is engaged in work to make "computers usable in African languages". In her research, Ife advocates for Afrocentric NLP for African languages, in order to ensure that the unique features of African languages which distinguish them from Indo-European languages are properly modelled in language technologies developed for African languages.

Laura Alonso Alemany is a linguist working in Natural Language Processing applications and teaching Computer Science at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina and a member of the Ethics in AI team of Fundación Vía Libre. She is interested in how empirical methods can help understand natural language phenomena, especially for minority languages. She enjoys error analysis of automatic procedures, and trying to understand the different impacts of different errors, in a broader sense.

Steven Bird has spent 25 years pursuing scalable computational methods for capturing, enriching, and analysing data from endangered languages, drawing on fieldwork in West Africa, South America, and Melanesia. Over the past 5 years he has begun to work with remote Aboriginal communities in northern Australia. Steven has held academic positions at U Edinburgh, U Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, and U Melbourne. He currently holds the positions of professor at Charles Darwin University, linguist at Nawarddeken Academy, and producer at languageparty.org.

Daniel Hershcovich is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Natural Language Processing section, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He was previously a postdoc at the same section, after completing his PhD on meaning representation parsing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with Ari Rappoport and Omri Abend. During 2008-2019, Daniel was also part of Project Debater, IBM Research. His research interests include adapting and generalizing language models and data across cultures and languages, combining explicit representation of natural language semantics and pragmatics with neural models, and promoting socially and environmentally responsible development of language technology. His first paper, on a meaning representation parser, won an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2017.

Manuel Mager is an Applied Scientist at AWS AI Labs, and completing his Ph.D. candidate at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in informatics from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and did a Master's in Computer Science at the Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico (UAM). His research is focused on Natural Language Processing for low resource languages, mainly indigenous languages of the American continent that are polysynthetic. He also worked on Graph-to-text generation and information extraction.

Genta Indra Winata is a Senior Research Scientist at Bloomberg LP, New York. His current research interests lie primarily in the area of the Language Model, Multilingual, Low-Resource Languages, Code-Switching, Dialogue System, and Speech. He has been actively working in building language models and large-scale benchmarks for Indonesian languages, such as IndoNLU and IndoNLG, and NusaX for underrepresented regional languages. He serves as a program committee for ML and NLP venues, such as ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and AAAI conferences, and senior area chair for ACL Industry Track 2023. His work has been awarded the best paper award in RepL4NLP 2019, Honorable Mention in the Workshop of NLP for Conversation AI 2021, and student best paper in ICEEI 2015 and DialDoc 2022. He also co-organizes the Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL) Workshop 2023 and Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (CALCS) Workshop 2023 (co-located with EMNLP 2023).