Important Information

A workshop on natural language processing and understanding, with the aim to facilitate interaction between our partners, students and faculty members. The intended audience is individuals who are already familiar with the area of natural language processing. Members of the scientific committee are still accepting proposals for short seminar-style talks (contact: prato.gab@gmail.com). Students are especially encouraged to submit proposals, and note that ensuring diversity in both speakers and topics is an important objective for the final program.

Note that the second afternoon is reserved for Alliance research group discussions.

Organizers: Alain Tapp, Will Hamilton and Gabriel Prato

Scientific program: Will Hamilton, Jackie Cheung, Philippe Langlais and Alain Tapp

Date: September 17-18

Location: Mila Auditorium

Number of participants: 120 (maximum)

Registration

First arrived first serve. Only applications from MILA/IVADO/RALI/CRM partners, students and researchers will be accepted. Participants must be individuals actively involved in NLP research and/or development and a priority to individuals committed to the Alliance NSERC NLP project will be granted.

Cost: 20$

REGISTRATION FORM

Program

September 17

• 8h30 : Registration (Charlie Mainville and Charles Guille-Escuret)
• 9h00 : Alain Tapp, Welcome address, introduction to Mila, IVADO and CRM, presentation of the MTL NLP Consortium (Alliance) and brief description of the Aristotle project.
• 9h40 : Sasha Luccioni, Mila, Detecting Climate Change Misinformation in the Media
• 10h10 : Koustuv Sinha, Mila, Unreferenced approaches to evaluating dialogue agent performance
• 10h40 : Coffee break
• 11h00 : Will Hamilton, McGill Mila, CLUTRR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Inductive Reasoning from Text
• 12h00 : Lunch break with lunch box provided
• 13h30 : Philippe Langlais, RALI UdeM, Named-entity recognition @ RALI
• 14h00 : Laurent Charlin, HEC, Conversational recommenders
• 14h30 : Leila Kosseim, Concordia, NLP at CLaC
• 15h00 : Coffee break
• 15h20 : Jackie Cheung, McGill Mila, New Directions in Automatic Text Summarization
• 16h00 : End of the day

September 18 AM

• 9h00 : Public industrial talks from any participants
  • Jonathan Rouxel, Prologue AI
  • Sébastien Paquet (Coveo), Practical NLP challenges in multitenant, multi-languages and diverse use cases
• 10h00 : Coffee break
• 10h20 : Public industrial talks from any participants
  • Alexis Smirnov (Dialogue Inc), Introduction to Rasa and its architecture
  • Ahmad Rashid (Huawei), From Unsupervised Machine Translation to Adversarial Text Generation
• 12h00: End of day

Alliance grant proposal specific private meetings (September 18 PM)

• 12h00 - 13h00 : Lunch break with lunch box provided for Alliance grant proposal participants
• 13h00: Alliance/Prompt Grant status
  • Researchers, partners, administrative team
• The 6 R&D themes
  • Academic lead, industrial lead
• Roles & responsibilities
  • What to expect
• Consortium Website
• Upcoming activities
  • Monthly meetups
  • Opportunity: Mitacs Summer 2020
  • Opportunity: Problem solving workshop summer 2020
• The Aristotle framework (seminar by Alain Tapp)
• Open discussion