EUtopia Workshop builds bridges between research and education
The workshop Beyond Words: Human-centred AI was hosted by the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, together with EUtopia, in the beginning of October. The main idea of this collaboration is to encourage research and teaching activities between the Universities of Gothenburg, Ljubljana and Barcelona.
During the two days about 60 participants joined the seminars at campus Humanisten in Gothenburg and a similar number joined on Zoom across the different sessions.
The workshop had guests from Slovenia, Belgium, Germany, France, and the UK, as well as from the local industry (Volvo) and charities, who presented a variety of research projects and opportunities for students and researchers in Computational Linguistics.
”The idea of this workshop is to build bridges between different research groups and between research and education both nationally and internationally centred around the interface between language technology and the Humanities. This was a good start and we hope that this will inspire to initiate new projects and ideas", says Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Professor of Linguistics and one of the five organizers of the workshop.
Voices from the participants
”The workshop gave me the opportunity to explore areas of Language Technology that I could work with in the future.
I would have liked to see more participants from the business world to hear more about the issues they face.”
Amanda Mårdh, Master’s student in Language Technology
”One of the standout aspects for me was the focus on cutting-edge technologies, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), which are driving significant advances in the field. I was particularly interested to learn about recent research into how to assess linguistic differences between human and machine-generated text, and whether these differences are still detectable. This is a critical area as we continue to refine the capabilities of AI systems”
Pierluigi Cassotti, Researcher and part of the program Change is Key!
”The entire workshop was so relevant for our times where machines talk and perceive more and more complex language. The take-home message for me was that human interaction is extremely messy, full of incomplete and repaired exchanges, and much more organic than an idealized system of exchanges. I think that is what makes human dialogue challenging to model but also interesting to explore.”
Talha Bedir, PhD student in computational linguistics
”It was inspiring to see how different traditions and themes could come together, both on a theoretical and practical level. I was also given new names and faces to associate with different aspects of linguistics. In the future it will be easier to find people to collaborate with thanks to the interactions at this workshop.”
Erik Lagerstedt, Postdoc in the research project DivCon
The workshop Beyond Words – Theoretical, Experimental, and Computational Approaches
to Language, Contexts, and Modalities took place 3 - 4 Oct 2024.
Find out more on the website EUtopia: Human-centred AI
