Community/training

Background

After a two-year pandemic hiatus, the NLPL network and Horizon Europe project High-Performance Language Technologies (HPLT) join forces to re-launch the successful winter school series on large-scale NLP. The winter school seeks to stimulate community formation, i.e. strengthening interaction and collaboration among Nordic and 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. The 2023 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, and 2020 NLPL Winter Schools.

For early 2023, HPLT will hold its winter school from Monday, February 6, to Wednesday, February 8, 2022, at a mountain-side hotel (with skiing 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 9:30 on Monday morning and returning there around 17:30 on Wednesday afternoon.

The main external instructors in 2020 will be Yoav Goldberg (Bar Ilan University and Allen Institute for AI) and Thomas Wolf (Huggingface). Additional sessions will be contributed by NLPL project members, including

• Filip Ginter and Antti Virtanen, on multi-gpu training of language-specific BERTs;
• Joakim Nivre and Artur Kulmizev, on syntactic dependency parsing in the neural age;
• Stephan Oepen and Daniel Hershcovich, on the 2019 and 2020 CoNLL tasks on semantic parsing;
• Jörg Tiedemann and Alessandro Raganato, with a practical crash course in neural MT.

Some sessions will combine lecturing and hands-on exercises. The winter school programme will be complemented with an evening ‘research bazar’ (by participants) to stimulate academic socializing and a ‘walk-through’ of available infrastructure on the shared EuroHPC LUMI supercomputer.

The winter school is subsidized by the 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 3190, to be paid to the hotel directly.

Programme

The 2023 winter school will have a thematic focus on Large-Scale Language Modeling and Neural Machine Translation with Web Data. The programme will be comprised of in-depth technical presentations (including some hands-on elements) from, among others, the BigScience and Corpora from the Web (COW) initiatives, but also include critical reflections on working with massive, uncurated language data.

Monday, February 6, 2023
13:00	14:00	Lunch
14:00	15:30	Session 1
15:30	15:50	Coffee Break
15:50	17:20	Session 2
17:20	17:40	Coffee Break
17:40	19:10	Session 3
19:30		Dinner
21:00		Research Bazaar Everyone: Upstairs Bar

Tuesday, February 7, 2022
Breakfast is available from 07:30
08:30	10:00	Session 4
Lunch is available between 13:00 and 14:30
15:00	16:20	Session 5
16:20	16:40	Coffee Break
16:40	18:00	Session 6
18:00	18:10	Coffee Break
18:10	19:30	Session 7
19:30		Dinner

Wednesday, February 8, 2020
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

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 shall leave OSL airport no later than 9:30 CET on Monday, February 6. Thus, please meet up at 9:15 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 bus and taxi information booth in the downstairs arrivals area, just outside the international arrivals luggage claims and slightly to the right, as one exits the customs area: The yellow dot numbered (17) on the OSL arrivals map. The group will then walk over to the bus terminal, to leave the airport by 9:30. 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 8, before the group returns to OSL on the NLPL shuttle. The bus will leave Skeikampen at 14:00 CET, with an expected arrival time at OSL airport around 17:00 to 17:30 CET.

Registration

In total, we anticipate up to 50 participants in the 2023 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; the closing date for registration is Thursday, December 15, 2022. Once confirmed by the organizing team, registration will establish a binding agreement with the hotel and a cancellation fee will be incurred (unless we can find someone else to ‘take over’ last-minute spaces).

Organization

The 2023 Winter School is organized by a team of volunteers from the NLPL and HPLT networks, 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

+ Hans Eide (Uninett Sigma2, Norway) + Filip Ginter (University of Turku, Finland) + Barry Haddow (University of Edinburgh, UK) + Jan Hajic (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic) + Christian Hardmeier + Daniel Hershcovich + Marco Kuhlmann + Andrey Kutuzov (University of Oslo, Norway) + Joakim Nivre (RISE and Uppsala University, Sweden) + Stephan Oepen (University of Oslo, Norway) + Sampo Pyysalo (University of Turku, Finland) + Magnus Sahlgreen + Jörg Tiedemann (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Participants

1. Stephan Oepen (Oslo)