Panel Discussion on Language Technologies

Title: "Make Your "Wish List" for the Forthcoming 10 Years"

Scheduled for Monday, June 21 from 18:30 till 20:00 in Orlando Hall.

Panelists:

• Marko Grobelnik, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Erhard Hinrichs, Tübingen University, Germany
• Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, Inc., USA
• Peter Wittenburg, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands
  

General Framework for Discussion:
Language Technologies address problems related to natural language and speech providing infrastructure to information society in general, as well as providing valuable underlying technology for a number of research areas. Basic language technology infrastructure has already been developed for major European languages, but availability of more sophisticated technologies vary for other European and non-European languages.

This discrepancy in the usage of language technologies in society as well as in other research areas currently opens a number of challenges.  The panel will focus on challenges related to language technologies and their usage by other research areas including information retrieval, text mining, machine translation, knowledge representation, speech recognition and synthesis, but also the role of language technologies in building research infrastructures.

All the participants are invited to contribute to the discussion.

Tutorial

Title: "Text Mining and Link Analysis for Web and Semantic Web"
Presenters:  Dunja Mladenic and Marko Grobelnik, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia

Scheduled for Monday, June 21 from 12:30 till 14:00 and from 16:00 till 18:00 in Orlando Hall.

Abstract:
The tutorial will focus on two main analytical approaches when analyzing web data: text mining and link analysis for the purpose of analyzing web documents and their linkage.
First, the tutorial will cover some basic steps and problems when dealing with the textual and network (graph) data showing what is possible to achieve without very sophisticated technology. The idea of this first part is to present the nature of un-structured and semi-structured data.
Next, in the second part, more sophisticated methods for solving more difficult and challenging problems will be shown.
In the last part, some of the current open research issues will be presented and some practical pointers on the available tools for solving previously mentioned problems will be provided.

Workshop (link)

Title: "Teaching with Web 2.0 Tools: Evaluation, Pedagogy and Integration Solutions"
Presenters:  Goran Bubas, Tihomir Orehovacki and Igor Balaban, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Scheduled for Tuesday, June 22 from 16:00 till 19:00 in Orlando Hall.
 
Abstract:
The focus of the workshop will be on the evaluation and selection of appropriate Web 2.0 tools for e-learning, as well as on the demonstration of their use in several hybrid university courses. The following categories of Web 2.0 tools will be presented: mind-mapping, block-diagrams, notes taking, online presentations, social networking, and online comic strip creation. The pedagogical background for the use of such tools will be provided with recommended user scenarios. To organize the work of students and to integrate the content that they produce using various Web 2.0 tools the online educators can use LMSs (e.g. Moodle), wikies, blogs, and ePortfolios. Related research topics are also discussed for those who are interested in analyzing (and publishing) their work on the use of e-learning in education.