Conference ‘Corpus Technologies, Digital Humanities and Modern Research’ Held at HSE Nizhny Novgorod
The event was organized by the Faculty of Humanities at HSE Nizhny Novgorod and the School of Linguistics at HSE Moscow on October 14-16, 2016.
HSE Nizhny Novgorod welcomed participants from Israel, France, Estonia and Finland. According to the organizers, meetings of experts on corpus technologies are unusual in Russia, that’s why the annual conference at HSE is a great opportunity for specialists in different fields of computational linguistics to share their research plans and ideas. This year there were a lot of practice-oriented reports, including reports on automatic processing of news articles; the creation of personal journal corpora; automatic determination of the author’s gender based on the text; incorrect statement filtering, etc.
Digital humanities have made huge progress from simple representation of texts on the Internet to complete systems helping to trace storyline, semantic fields relevant for a work analysis, syntactic features of texts, etc.
‘The conference is becoming a tradition, it has been held every year since 2013. Each report is actively discussed, the work is intensive. It is evident that our experts have a lot of interesting projects that they look forward to sharing with their colleagues. The main goal of the conference is to attract young researchers. And, judging by the number of student reports, it looks as if this goal has been achieved,’ – says Alexey Malafeev, Associate Professor at the School of Applied Linguistics and Foreign Languages.
‘I would like to mention two important things about this year’s conference. A lot of young researchers –master’s and doctoral students – took part in the event. There was a special student section in typology - the science that studies similarities among different languages. The reports were presented at a very high level. I would like emphasise the enthusiasm of young researchers who participated in the discussion of research problems. In this sense, I think the conference played an important role in promoting professional communication and strengthening academic contacts among young researchers.
The second thing concerns the intensive programme of the conference. We limited the conference to two parallel sections only so that the participants had more opportunities to attend each other’s presentations. All the reports were discussed with great interest and often with polemical ardor. I think it is important for any researcher to get feedback on his/her research project from a large number of participants at the conference.
I would like to thank our volunteers- first-year students of the programme in Applied Linguistics, who welcomed the guests of our campus,’ – says Dmitry Bosnak, Associate Professor at the Department of Literature and Intercultural Communication.
Alexandra Ustiukhina, student of the programme in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics
It was the first conference that I had attended during my studies at HSE, and I have to say that I was absolutely thrilled! All the speakers were experts in their fields, the reports were varied, I managed to learn more about not only theoretical studies, but also practice-oriented projects, both Russian and international. Students of my educational programme also prepared interesting presentations. For me, a person who is only just starting to study computational linguistics, it was important to know how the knowledge gained during studies can be applied to real life.
Nikita Chestnov, student of the programme in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics
The conference featured reports intended for linguists as well as the reports that could interest everyone. For example, I liked the report ‘Some new ways of looking at language change in corpora and beyond’ by Eitan Grossman from Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The report on the composition and structure of the text corpus ’RusGenderAttr’ and its potential for study of the characteristics of male and female writing was also interesting.
Elvira Ismailova, student of the programme in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics
I attended the section on text automatic processing and linguistic technologies and the follow-up plenary session. I was impressed by the topical reports, professionalism and enthusiasm of the participants, and the difficult, but interesting questions, from the audience. Most of all I liked the reports by forth-year students of our educational programme and the original presentations of the plenary session participants.
Anastasia Viunova, student of the programme in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics
It was great. It was very interesting to learn about research plans of our Moscow and international colleagues, about new corpora and research approaches. The plenary sessions were also excellent.