Prof. Dr. Alexander M. Fraser
TU Munich - Chair for Data Analytics & Statistics
Language Community Workshops

Information on the 2025 Workshop for Language Communities

First Slide set (Shu Okabe)

Second Slide Set (Alexander Fraser)

Invitation to the first online workshop on NLP tools for language communities

We are Natural Language Processing (NLP) researchers from the Technical University of Munich, located at TUM Campus Heilbronn in Germany. This workshop may appeal to you if you are a language activist, work in collaboration with language activists or with low-resource languages.

As part of our research, we currently aim to provide NLP tools and models tailored to language organisations and communities. In this regard, we are pleased to invite you or language activists from your network to our first 2-hour online workshop on tools for low-resource languages. We are currently focusing on languages for which some digital texts are available.

This work is part of the ERC Proof of Concept Grant Data4ML (Data for Multilingual Learning), which focuses on creating tools for language activists. Additionally, our research group has recently received an ERC Advanced Grant to develop Large Language Models for languages with limited digital resources (EPICAL). Both grants enable more long-term collaboration with language communities.

This first session will be in two parts:

- we will present our tool for parallel sentence mining (i.e., finding translation pairs among two monolingual corpora) for low-resource languages. This task constitutes an essential step towards developing a dedicated machine translation system or enabling a large language model to support your language. Details on the tool can be found on github: paper.pdf, project.

- we will show the diversity of possible NLP tools that could be extended to other languages. These will range from spell checkers to speech recognition, but with a strong focus on machine translation and chatbots.

To accommodate different time zones, we currently plan on offering two identical workshop sessions of 2 hours: Tuesday, 4th February at 18:00 and Thursday, 6th February at 10:00 (Central European Time; CET) (Zoom links below).

We would be delighted to have you among us for this first session and hope this will be the first in a series of Zoom workshops.

If you are interested in attending the workshop or would like to stay in touch for future updates, please fill out this form

Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

Best regards,

Alexander Fraser and Shu Okabe

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1. Zoom link 4th February (18:00 CET):

Time: Feb 4, 2025 06:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna

Join Zoom Meeting

https://tum-conf.zoom-x.de/j/65159468381?pwd=1kSHlAUJs64gbybtRKoVmU4SkK3bUG.1

Meeting ID: 651 5946 8381

Passcode: 178965

2. Zoom link 6th February (10:00 CET):

Time: Feb 6, 2025 10:00 AM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna

Join Zoom Meeting

https://tum-conf.zoom-x.de/j/68411142377?pwd=P4Z3KnHl9UG48Yxc9sOhX7VAQmOuYo.1

Meeting ID: 684 1114 2377

Passcode: 025895

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