Program
The workshop format has been updated to try be as inclusive of as many timezones as possible. The workshop will be split into a UTC Morning session which is Europe, Africa and Asia friendly, and a UTC Evening session which is more America friendly.
Virtual Logistics
- The workshop will be hosted online via the Official ICLR 2020 Virtual Workshop Portal
- The workshop calendar can be viewed in your timezone here
- Discussions, comments and questions can be posted on the Rocket Chat embedded in the virtual workshop portal
- The invited and contributed talks are pre-recorded. But the end of the sessions, there will be a Live Q&A with the speakers of the invited and contributed talks. The hosts will ask the questions from rocket chat during those sessions
- The poster sessions also consists of short 3-5 minute talks. We have asked the poster presenters to be available via rocket chat to answer questions. (Unfortunately live Q&A poster sessions per person were not logistically viable)
- We encourage the authors and attendees to have their own zoom calls or chats. Let’s make those magical conference corridor chats happen! :)
Morning Session (UTC)
Morning Invited & Contributed Talks (UTC)
| Time | Title | Speaker | Resources | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7:00 AM | Opening Remarks | Kathleen Siminyu | ||
| 7:10 AM | Invited Talk: Masakhane, A Focus on Machine Translation for African Languages | Jade Abbott | video paper, slides | |
| 7:45 AM | Contributed Talk: Towards Supervised and Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation Baselines for Nigerian Pidgin | Orevaoghene Ahia | video paper | |
| 8:05 AM | Contributed Talk: Distant Supervision and Noisy Label Learning for Low Resource Named Entity Recognition: A Study on Hausa and Yorùbá | David Adelani | video paper, poster | |
| 8:25 AM | AI4D Challenge Winner: Crowdsourcing a Wolof ASR dataset using a custom built tool | Thierno Diop | video slides |
Morning Poster Session (UTC)
| Time | Title | Speaker | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8:35 AM | Tunizi: A Tunisian Arabizi Sentiment Analysis Dataset | Chayma Fourati | video poster |
| 8:40 AM | The Modified Segmentation Algorithm for Recognition of Ancient Ge’ez Scripts Written on the Vellum | Girma Sisay | |
| 8:45 AM | Unsupervised Pidgin Text Generation By Pivoting English Data and Self-Training | Ernie Chang | videos paper, poster |
| 8:50 AM | Using LSTM Networks to Translate from French to Senegalese Local Languages: Wolof as a Case Study | Alla Lo | videos paper, poster |
| 8:55 AM | Amharic Abstractive Text Summarization | Amr Zaki | videos paper, poster |
| 9:00 AM | A Hierarchical Transformer for Unsupervised Parsing | Ashok Thillaisundaram | video paper, poster |
| 9:05 AM | On optimal transformer depth for low-resource language translation | Elan van Biljon | video paper, poster |
| 9:10 AM | Combining Pretrained High-Resource Embeddings and Subword Representations for Low-Resource Languages | Machel Reid | video paper, poster |
| 9:15 AM | Evaluating Amharic Machine Translation | Asmelash Teka Hadgu | video paper, poster |
| 9:20 AM | FFR V1.0: Fon-French Neural Machine Translation | Chris Emezue & Bonaventure Dossou | video paper, poster |
| 9:25 AM | Using Punkt for Sentence Segmentation in non-Latin Scripts: Experiments on Kurdish (Sorani) Texts | Roshna Omer Abdulrahman | video poster |
| 9:30 AM | Tigrinya Neural Machine Translation with Transfer Learning for Humanitarian Response | Alp Oktem | video paper, poster |
| 9:45 AM | Invited Talk: IntrodUTCion to Multilingual Wikipedia Data for NLP | Isaac Johnson | video slides |
Morning Q&A with Invited & Contributed talk speakers (UTC)
| 10:00 AM | LIVE Q&A with Invited & Contributed talk speakers | Jade Abbott, Orevaoghene Ahia, David Adelani, Theirno Diop, Isaac Johnson, moderated by Kathleen Siminyu |
Midday Datathon (UTC)
The Wikimedia team are hosting a Datathon which will run from 10:30AM - 15:00, in between the morning and evening session. So bring along your grandmother, your partner, your roommate, and let’s work together to contribute to wikipedia for our native languages!
Here is the talk about what you can do
Here are some useful links for when you need them:
- Content Translation Overview
- Content Translation isiZulu
- Content Translation Kiswahili
- isiZulu + Parallel Translation
- isiZulu + Topic Classification
- Kiswahili + Parallel Translation
- Kiswahili + Topic Classification
Isaac Johnson from Wikimedia is available on Rocket chat to help you start translating data for your language!
While you’re contributing, feel free to checkout the presentations by AI4Dev projects, across Africa.
Evening Session (UTC)
Evening Invited & Contributed Talks (UTC)
| Time | Title | Speaker | Resources | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15:00 | Invited Talk: The Low-resource Natural Language Processing Toolbox, 2020 Version | Graham Neubig | slides | |
| 15:35 | Panel Discussion: What are African NLP’s Moonshot Problems? | Natalie Schluter, Sebastian Ruder, Surafel Melaku Lakew, moderated by Jade Abbott | ||
| 16:10 | Contributed Talk: Towards A Sign Language Gloss Representation Of Modern Standard Arabic | Salma El Anigri | poster | |
| 16:30 | Contributed Talk: Improving Yorùbá Diacritic Restoration | David Adelani | paper, poster | |
| 16:50 | AI4D Challenge Winner: Creating MT and ASR datasets from online sources (video may not be available) | Dosseh Ameck Guy Max Desire | slides |
Evening Poster Session (UTC)
| Time | Title | Speaker | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17:00 | Investigating an approach for low resource language dataset creation, curation and classification: Setswana and Sepedi | Vukosi Marivate | paper, slides |
| 17:05 | Pooled Embeddings for Unsupervised IndUTCion of Yorùbá Morphology | Olamilekan Wahab | |
| 17:10 | Neural Machine Translation for South Africa’s Official Languages (video wont be available) | Jason Webster | |
| 17:15 | Assessing Human Translations from French to Bambara for Machine Learning: a Pilot Study | Allahsera Auguste Tapo | paper, poster |
| 17:20 | A Benchmark Dataset for Igbo-English Machine Translation | Ignatius Ezeani | paper, poster |
| 17:25 | Bert Fine-tuning For Arabic Text Summarization | Khalid Elmadani | poster |
| 17:30 | Semantic Enrichment of Nigerian Pidgin English for Contextual Sentiment Classification | Wuraola Oyewusi | paper, poster |
| 17:35 | Low Resource Neural Machine Translation: A Benchmark for Five African Languages | Surafel Melaku Lakew | paper, poster |
| 17:40 | Neurals Networks for Projecting Named Entities from English to Ewondo | Michael Franklin Mbouopda | poster |
| 17:45 | Neural Machine Translation for African Languages | Xian Li | poster |
| 17:50 | Towards Neural Machine Translation for Edoid Languages | Iroro Orife | paper, poster |
Evening Q&A with Invited & Contributed talk speakers
| 18:00 | LIVE Q&A with Invited & Contributed talk Speakers | Graham Neubig, Salma El Anigri, Iroro Orife, David Adelani Dosseh Ameck Guy Max Desire | |
| 18:30 | Closing Remarks | Vukosi Marivate |