Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024) was organized by two major international key players in computational linguistics, the ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) on 20-25 May, 2024 in Torino, Italy.
Four ISSAI papers were presented at the prestigious language resources conference LREC-COLING 2024:
1) “KazEmoTTS: A Dataset for Kazakh Emotional Text-to-Speech Synthesis” authored by Adal Abilbekov, Saida Mussakhojayeva, Rustem Yeshpanov, and Huseyin Atakan Varol;
2) “KazParC: Kazakh Parallel Corpus for Machine Translation” authored by Rustem Yeshpanov, Alina Polonskaya, Huseyin Atakan Varol;
3) “KazQAD: Kazakh Open-Domain Question Answering Dataset” authored by Rustem Yeshpanov, Pavel Efimov, Leonid Boytsov, Ardak Shalkarbayuli, Pavel Braslavski;
4) “KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes” authored by Rustem Yeshpanov, Huseyin Atakan Varol.
ISSAI members, including data scientists Rustem Yeshpanov and Alina Polonskaya, along with deputy director Yerbol Absalyamov, attended the conference where they showcased the Institute’s projects and accomplishments to the global research community. ELRA Chair Dr. Khalid Choukri expressed enthusiasm about ISSAI’s active involvement in the natural language processing field and praised the Institute for being a consistent and high-quality contributor to LREC.
During the conference, Rustem Yeshpanov, Alina Polonskaya, and Yerbol Absalyamov participated in several workshops. These are “Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia – EURALI” which focuses on developing language technology resources and tools for indigenous, endangered and lesser-resourced languages on the Eurasian continent. They also attended a workshop on bridging the gap between technology and legal frameworks, discussing current legal and ethical issues in the human language technology sector, titled “Legal and Ethical Issues in Human Language Technologies”. Additionally, they participated in the “Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages (SIGUL)” which covered research interests related to less-resourced, under-resourced, endangered, and minority languages.
At the LREC-COLING 2024 conference, researchers and practitioners in computational linguistics, speech, multimodality, and natural language processing had the chance to exchange information and ideas through oral presentations and extensive poster sessions. ISSAI members used this opportunity to strengthen ties with the research community and foster interactions with fellow researchers and industry professionals for potential collaborations. Researchers from other countries showed interest in ISSAI’s data collection processes and results. Some even proposed partnerships and inquired about using ISSAI’s datasets in their own research projects.