SmILE Semantic Information Systems and Language Engineering Group

Its over 2 months now since I attended LREC - Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, in Marrakech, Morroco, but the memories are still quite fresh in my mind.
Its been a while since I attended a conference (not since my Masters thesis :-)) so overall I was quite excited about attending. LREC did not disappoint, it was a like a bazaar, with regard to what was on offer. Workshops and presentations, posters appeared to cover all aspects of NLP and computational linguistics - both applied and theoretical. LREC was founded to promote networking and cooperation within the NLP/CL/HLT community international as whole, the topics are quite broad ensuring that every 2 years everyone within the community irregardless of their area of research will have an opportunity to exchange knowledge. And LREC did just that with over 1,100 participants this year! If you are looking to cooperate with others, network, and get a snapshot of what is happening in HLT (especially if you are PhD Student in NLP), I think LREC is the place to go. Since my undergraduate degree I would say ive been quite rusty with respect to what has progressed in HLT in areas outside of my PhD, so for instance Machine Translation(MT) and Corpus Linguistics, LREC provided me with an excellent opportunity to brush up, not to mention generally get an idea of what other people are up to in my research area. With respect to Semantic Web it appears some in the CL/NLP world seem slightly oblivious to the whole initiative , dare I say that some think its a fad or "Isn't is just go old fashioned AI?". Yorrick Wilks won the 2008 Antonio Zampolli Prize for outstanding contribution to the advancement of
Language Resources and Language Technology Evaluation within Human Language Technologies. He give a really great/acceptance speech/presentation an you can find the slides on the LREC08 site (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/Antonio-Zampolli-Prize.html )and he discussed the Semantic Web towards the end, in particular semantic annotation, and the role NLP has/can have. I attended several workshops one being Ontolex (Ontology Lexicalisation) another on Partial Parsing and Natural Language Processing resources, algorithms and tools for authoring aids. There was also a strong industrial presence notably IBM (from one of the US CASs), Microsoft, and PowerSet (prior to the acquisition:-)by Microsoft) and made some friendly contacts from Powerset and Microsoft.
For me the most beneficial outcome was meeting some interesting researchers within the Natural Language Generation who had worked on the RAGS project and are involved in CLEF. If you want to check the proceedings for LREC they are available online at (http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2008/