The NLP Seminar is organised by the Linguistic Engineering Group at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (ICS PAS). It takes place on (some) Mondays, usually at 10:15 am, often online – please use the link next to the presentation title. All recorded talks are available on YouTube.

7 October 2024

Janusz S. Bień (University of Warsaw, profesor emeritus)

Identifying glyphs in some 16th century fonts: a case study  

Some glyphs from 16th century fonts, described in the monumental work “Polonia Typographica Saeculi Sedecimi”, can be more or less easily identified with the Unicode standard characters. Some glyphs don't have Unicode codepoints, but can be printed with an appropriate OpenType/TrueType fonts using typographic features. For some of them their encoding remains an open question. Some examples will be discussed.

14 October 2024

Alexander Rosen (Charles University in Prague)

Lexical and syntactic variability of languages and text genres. A corpus-based study  

This study examines metrics of syntactic complexity (SC) and lexical diversity (LD) as tools for analyzing linguistic variation within and across languages. Using quantifiable measures based on cross-linguistically consistent (morpho)syntactic annotation (Universal Dependencies), the research utilizes parallel texts from a large multilingual corpus (InterCorp). Six SC and two LD metrics – covering the length and embedding levels of nominal and clausal constituents, mean dependency distance (MDD), and sentence length – are applied as metadata for sentences and texts.

The presentation will address how these metrics can be visualized and incorporated into corpus queries, how they reflect structural differences across languages and text types, and whether SC and LD vary more across languages or text types. It will also consider the impact of language-specific annotation nuances and correlations among the measures. The analysis includes comparative examples from Polish, Czech, and other languages.

Preliminary findings indicate higher SC in non-fiction compared to fiction across languages, with nominal and clausal metrics being dominant factors. The results suggest distinct patterns for MDD and sentence length, highlighting the impact of structural differences (e.g., analytic vs. synthetic morphology, dominant word-order patterns) and the influence of source text type and style.

28 October 2024 (Note: the talk will take place at 12:00 pm)

Rafał Jaworski (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)

Modelling of structural and semantic linguistic information for the needs of algorithms of natural language analysis and processing.  

The presentation will cover my research in the field of natural language processing for computer-aided translation and linguistic research. This research is interdisciplinary in nature – it is a contribution to technical computer science and is applied in linguistics.

In particular, I will present algorithms for parallelizing sentences at the word and phrase level using multilingual word embeddings. I will describe a process of acquiring and converting embeddings which are comparable between different languages. These embeddings are used in computer-aided translation systems, for instance in the algorithm of automatic transfer of technical tags from the source sentence to the target sentence. The research on computer-aided translation also includes an algorithm for optimal concordance search in translation memories.

In the area of supporting linguistic work, I will present an algorithm for supporting text annotation focused on selected morphological features. In addition, I will describe an algorithm for supporting lexicographic work, the aim of which was to build a thematic and chronological dictionary of the Polish language.

4 November 2024

Jakub Kozakoszczak (Deutsche Telekom)

ZIML: A Markup Language for Regex-Friendly Linguistic Annotation  

The summary of the talk will be made available shortly.

21 November 2024

Christian Chiarcos (University of Augsburg)

Aspects of Knowledge Representation for Discourse Relation Annotation  

The summary of the talk will be made available shortly.

2 December 2024

Participants of PolEval 2024

Presentation of the workshop results  

The program will be made available after the contest ends.

19 December 2024

Piotr Przybyła (Pompeu Fabra University / Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences)

Adaptive Attacks on Misinformation Detection Using Reinforcement Learning  

The summary of the talk will be made available shortly.

Please see also the talks given in 2000–2015 and 2015–2023.