Kuldar Aas

e-Estonia – What will the future of a digitised society be?

When Estonia started building its information society in the end of the 1990s, there was no digital data being collected about our citizens. The general population did not have the internet or even devices with which to use it. Two decades later the country has one of the most advanced e-governments in the world, where more than 90% of public information is managed in digital form and most public services, ranging from pet registration to medical prescriptions and property ownership, are delivered in a “digital by default” manner. However, with such widespread digitisation of a society comes the responsibility to ensure that the vast amount of digital information being gathered on a daily basis remains to be available for the decades to come in a secure, trusted and sustainable manner.
The presentation will provide an overview of the origins and core aspects of the e-government approach in Estonia and the effect it has had on the lives of ordinary people. Based on this introduction the presentation will continue to discuss future challenges in regard to the long-term availability, trust and security of e-Estonia.

Biography

Kuldar Aas is the deputy director of the Digital Archives of the National Archives of Estonia. He has led the development of the Estonian governmental digital archives and the provision of guidelines, consultancy and training in regard to sustainable development of e-government systems and long-term preservation of government data. He is also a member of multiple national e-government working groups, for example the Estonian interministerial semantic interoperability and data embassy taskforces.
He has also been active in promoting international collaboration on digital sustainability by leading work packages in multiple international projects and acting as the technical coordinator of the recent EC-funded E-ARK project (http://www.eark-project.eu). Most recently his main interests are in the areas of long-term trust, security, sustainability and interoperability of e-government systems. He participates actively in relevant discussions among EU digital archives and has presented at numerous international conferences (ICA, DLM Forum, iPRES).

Wajdi Zaghouani

Language Technologies for Social Media

We are witnessing an increased interest from stakeholders to collect and analyse in real time the large-volume of information from social media streams using all kinds of applications ranging from information extraction tools to social media analytics and decision support systems. Social media text is generally noisy, short and linguistically rich as witnessed by the high frequency rate of code switching and colloquial expressions used. This talk will discuss the Natural Language Processing challenges and opportunities presented by the availability of large-volume unstructured user-generated social media data such as Facebook and Twitter as compared to the mainstream newswire sources.

The keynote presentation will start by an overview of the methods and tools used to collect, annotate and process social media content. Afterwards, some related applications will be illustrated such as social media monitors, author profiling applications and social media content summarisers. Finally, the various ethical considerations related to using social media data content in research will be discussed.

Biography

Dr. Wajdi Zaghouani is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. He received a PhD in linguistics and natural language processing from the University of Paris 10 Nanterre, Paris and an M.A in Linguistics from the University of Montreal. His research interests span in several areas of computational linguistics: Arabic NLP, linguistic annotation, language resources and evaluation, lexical-semantics and computational morphology. Over the years, he participated in multiple human language technology projects such as the Penn TreeBank and the PropBank in prestigious universities and research institutions such as: The University of Colorado Boulder (USA), the Joint Research Center of the European Commission (Italy), the University of Montreal (Canada), Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and the University of Pennsylvania (USA). He has more than 40 peer-reviewed publications in journals and international conferences.

Iana Atanassova

Information Retrieval and Semantic Annotation of Scientific Corpora

Scientific papers are highly structured texts and display specific properties related to their references but also argumentative and rhetorical structure. Natural Language Processing can be applied to efficiently explore scientific corpora and develop applications for the Semantic Web, Information Retrieval, Automatic Summarization and Bibliometrics.

The organization of scientific papers typically follows a standardized pattern, the well-known IMRaD structure (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion). By analysing the full text of about 80,000 papers of the PLOS corpus, the author studied this structure from several different perspectives. Firstly, the author performed quantitative and qualitative analyses of citations and their positions in the structure of papers. Secondly, she studied the occurrences of verbs in citation contexts and their similarities across the different sections. Finally, using sentence-based similarity metrics, the author quantified the phenomenon of text re-use in abstracts with respect to the IMRaD structure. This research allowed the author to establish some of the invariants of scientific papers and the results are useful for implementing novel text mining and information retrieval interfaces taking into consideration the argumentative structure of papers. More specifically, they can be considered as an important element when creating linguistic resources and rule-based methods to perform fine-grained semantic analysis of scientific papers.

Several applications will be presented around the exploitation of scientific corpora: a semantic search engine, spatial data visualization, characterizing citations and a visualization of verbs and their contexts around citations.

Biography

Dr. Iana Atanassova is associate professor at the Research Centre Lucien Tesnière for Linguistics and Natural Language Processing at the Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté in France. In 2015 she completed her Habilitation to Direct Research (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) in Natural Language Processing at the Université de Franche-Comté titled "Analysis of Scientific Discourse: Applications in Information Retrieval, Information Extraction and Semantic Web". She completed her PhD thesis with honors in the field of Semantic Information Retrieval at Paris-Sorbonne University. She has worked in industry as R&D project manager with the mission of developing a large-scale semantic search engine for open access scientific publications. Her research interests are in the fields of information extraction and semantic information retrieval, semantic annotation using knowledge-based methods and machine-learning, as well as multi-lingual automatic text processing.

Bruno Kragić

The Encyclopaedia in the Digital Era: A New Beginning or just the Beginning of the End

During the last ten years we have witnessed the transition of encyclopaedias from the printed into web form, most visible through the global spreading of Wikipedia, through its numerous varieties, as the most used encyclopaedia today. However, this opened the question about the change in the encyclopaedic principles and the encyclopaedic concept of knowledge. Besides the obvious change in the modes of use, there is the question regarding the encyclopaedic concept itself: web or virtual encyclopaedia is in itself never-ending and all-encompassing while the traditional, printed one had to define its range, number and dimension of the entries. Thus, while web encyclopaedia is more propulsive, open or "democratic", the "old" type was closer to the original encyclopaedic concept of the transmission of the knowledge. This put the encyclopaedia itself in the wider debate about the web communication.

Biography

Dr. Bruno Kragic is the director of The Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography as well as the deputy editor-in-chief of Croatian Encyclopaedia, published by the Institute. He has a Ph.D. from the Film Studies and teaches History and Aesthetics of Cinema at the Academy of Drama at the University of Zagreb. He was co-editor of the Film Lexicon, as well as various film and cultural magazines. Beside his interests in the classical cinema and the film terminology, his other main research interests lie in the fields of the history of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic knowledge.