EurNLP

The first European NLP Summit (EurNLP) will take place in London on October 11, 2019. It is an opportunity to promote discussion and collaboration between researchers in and around Europe.

The first European NLP Summit (EurNLP) will be held in London on October 11. Registration has already started. Travel grants are available.

The natural language processing community has experienced unprecedented growth in recent years (for example, see the ACL 2019 Chairs blog). As more people enter the field and NLP research grows in more places, making meaningful connections and communicating effectively becomes more difficult.

To make our conferences successful, we need structures that allow us to come together and provide mentorship and advice to the next generation of researchers and engineers. Additionally, we need mechanisms to facilitate collaboration and exchange of ideas within our community.

Conferences like NAACL 2019 promote initiatives that promote diversity and inclusion, such as teaching, childcare and live captioning. Additionally, meetings with related demographic groups (WiNLP, Queer in AI, Black in AI, etc.) and places like the “bird of a feather” tables facilitate meeting like-minded people.

In addition to the global exchange of information and ideas in the field, we believe that an effective way to foster such connections is at the regional level, connecting newcomers with experts in their vicinity and with each other. To keep the global community vibrant and healthy, we need to ensure that local talent can flourish and that role models and mentors are available to provide inspiration and feedback.

Europe has a strong and world-leading NLP community, with research hubs across the continent and located in both academia and industry. The goal of EurNLP (pronounced “Your NLP”) is to bring our community together. We would like to organize an informal focus gathering to promote discussion and collaboration between researchers in and around Europe. EurNLP is supported by EACL and aims to complement European events focused on scientific publications. It is also intended to complement summer schools focused on educating the next generation and can now be seen around the world, including in Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Europe.

EurNLP is inspired by the highly successful West Coast NLP Summit (WeCNLP). Unlike a purely scientific symposium, EurNLP is an industry-academia partnership and is hosted in collaboration with companies. In order to grow the European NLP community and solve the real problems that our society faces, we need to connect academia and industry and connect fundamental and applied research.

The first European NLP Summit will be held in London on October 11, 2019. Registration for EurNLP is now open. Thanks to sponsorship from our industry host Facebook and DeepMind, registration is not only free, but there are also travel grants available to students with an acceptable abstract.

– EurNLP Organizing Committee (Barbara Plank, Sebastian Ruder, Sebastian Riedel, Armand Julin, Fabrizio Silvestri)