Community/training

HPLT & NLPL 2025 Winter School on Pretraining Data Quality and Multilingual LLM Evaluation

Background

Since 2023, the NLPL network and Horizon Europe project High-Performance Language Technologies (HPLT) have joined forces to organize the successful winter school series on Web-scale NLP. The winter school seeks to stimulate community formation, i.e. strengthening interaction and collaboration among European research teams in NLP and advancing a shared level of knowledge and experience in using high-performance e-infrastructures for large-scale NLP research. This 2025 edition of the winter school puts special emphasis on NLP researchers from countries who participate in the EuroHPC LUMI consortium. For additional background, please see the archival pages from the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024 NLPL Winter Schools.

For early 2025, HPLT will hold its winter school from Monday, February 3, to Wednesday, February 5, 2025, at a mountain-side hotel (with skiing and walking opportunities) about two hours north of Oslo. The project will organize group bus transfer from and to the Oslo airport Gardermoen, leaving the airport at 9:45 on Monday morning and returning there around 17:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

The winter school is subsidized by the HPLT project: there is no fee for participants and no charge for the bus transfer to and from the conference hotel. All participants will have to cover their own travel and accomodation at Skeikampen, however. Two nights at the hotel, including all meals, will come to NOK 3855 (NOK 3455 per person in a shared double room), to be paid to the hotel directly.

Programme

The 2025 winter school will have a thematic focus on Pretraining Data Quality and Multilingual LLM Evaluation. The programme will be comprised of in-depth technical presentations (possibly including some hands-on elements) by seasoned experts, with special emphasis on open science and European languages, but also include critical reflections on current development trends in LLM-focussed NLP. The programme will be complemented with a panel discussion and a ‘walk-through’ of available infrastructure on the shared EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer.

Confirmed presenters include:

• Alexandra Birch, University of Edinburgh
• Jenia Jitsev, Jülich Supercomputing Centre
• Marianna Nezhurina, LAION
• Guilherme Penedo, Huggingface
• Gema Ramírez-Sánchez, Prompsit Language Engineering
• Anna Rogers, IT University of Copenhagen
• Ahmet Üstün, Cohere AI

Monday, February 3, 2025
13:00	14:00	Lunch
14:00	15:30	Session 1
15:30	15:50	Coffee Break
16:00	17:30	Session 2
17:30	17:50	Coffee Break
17:50	19:20	Session 3
19:30		Dinner

Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Breakfast is available from 07:30
09:00	10:30	Session 4
Free time (Lunch is available between 13:00 and 14:30)
15:00	16:30	Session 5
16:30	16:50	Coffee Break
16:50	17:40	Session 6
17:40	18:00	Coffee Break
18:00	19:15	Session 7
19:30		Dinner
21:00		Evening Session

Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Breakfast is available from 07:30
08:30	10:00	Session 8
10:00	10:30	Coffee Break
10:30	12:00	Session 9
12:30	13:30	Lunch
14:00	17:00	Bus transfer to OSL Airport

Registration

In total, we anticipate around 60 participants at the 2025 winter school. Please register your intent of participation through our on-line registration form. We will process requests for participation on a first-come, first-served basis, with an eye toward regional balance. Interested parties who have submitted the registration form will be confirmed in three batches, on December 6, on December 13, and on December 20, which was also the closing date for winter school registration.

Once confirmed by the organizing team, participant names are published on this page, and registration establishes a binding agreement with the hotel. Therefore, a cancellation fee will be incurred (unless we can find someone else to ‘take over’ last-minute spaces), and no-shows will be charged the full price for at least one night by the hotel.

Logistics

With a few exceptions, winter school participants travel to and from the conference hotel jointly on a chartered bus (the HPLT shuttle). The bus will leave OSL airport no later than 9:45 CET on Monday, February 3. Thus, please meet up by 9:30 and make your arrival known to your assigned ‘tour guide’ (who will introduce themselves to you by email beforehand).

The group will gather near the DNB currency exchange booth in the downstairs arrivals area, just outside the international arrivals luggage claims and slightly to the left as one exits the customs area: the yellow dot numbered (18) on the OSL arrivals map. The group will then walk over to the bus terminal, to leave the airport not long after 9:40. The drive to the Skeikampen conference hotel will take us about three hours, and the bus will make one stop along the way to stretch our legs and fill up on coffee.

The winter school will end with lunch on Wednesday, February 5, before the group returns to OSL airport on the HPLT shuttle. The bus will leave Skeikampen at 14:00 CET, with an expected arrival time at OSL around 17:00 to 17:30 CET. After stopping at the OSL airport, the bus will continue to central Oslo.

Organization

The 2025 Winter School is organized by a team of volunteers at the University of Oslo, supported by a programme committee from the HPLT and NLPL network and beyond, please see below. For all inquiries regarding registration, the programme, logistics, or such, please contact hplt-training@ifi.uio.no.

The programme committee is comprised of:

• Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Andrey Kutuzov (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway)
• Sampo Pyysalo (University of Turku, Finland)
• Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Participants

1. Andrey Kutuzov, University of Oslo (Norway)
2. Stephan Oepen, University of Oslo (Norway)