Staff from the Centre for Language Technology at the University of the Faroe Islands attended the major conference LREC-COLING2024 in Turin, Italy, from May 20-25. This year, the conference was a merging of two conferences, LREC (Language Resources and Evaluation Conference) and COLING (International Conference on Computational Linguistics). This academic conference had nearly 3,000 participants and 1,500 presentations on various topics and the latest research in language technology and computational linguistics. The staff particularly sought knowledge on topics such as machine translation, data augmentation, speech technology, data annotation, and evaluation of language models, which are their daily research areas.
There were two presentations from the University of the Faroe Islands. Barbara Scalvini and Iben Nyholm Debess presented the paper “Evaluating the potential of language-family-specific generative models for low-resource data augmentation: a Faroese case study,” which can be read here. Additionally, Iben Nyholm Debess from the University of the Faroe Islands and Hafsteinn Einarsson and Annika Simonsen from the University of Iceland presented the paper “Good or Bad News? Exploring GPT-4 for Sentiment Analysis for Faroese on a Public News Corpus,” which can be read here.
The staff returned home enriched with a lot of new knowledge, ideas, and professional connections that will advance the activities at the Centre for Language Technology in the future.
