Text Analytics is used in many companies and industrial sectors, for instance for process optimization, for decision support, or to develop new products and services. Our goal is to bring together practitioners and researchers, to give an overview of existing solutions and technologies, and to come up with ideas for new and innovative projects using automatic text understanding.
In order to achieve this goal, we invite practitioners, analysts, end users, software vendors, researchers and data scientists to join SwissText 2018, the third edition of the conference for text analytics.

Building on the success of the previous editions of the conference, SwissText 2018 will be held on two days for the first time.
Like in the previous years, one main goal of the conference is to bring together Swiss practitioners and researchers, to give an overview of existing solutions and applications in the domain of text analytics, and to come up with ideas for new and innovative projects. The additional day will allow for even more networking opportunities this year, and we will have a Swiss Track, where all presentations will have a certain "Swissness"-factor.
In addition, we also invite the international scientific community to participate in the conference. We will have a "classical" Scientific Track, where you can present state-of-the-art technical papers.
Scientific papers will be published in the conference proceedings, together with abstracts of the Swiss Track presentations (see Call for Papers for details).
Keynote Speakers
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Eneko Agirre, Professor, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Eneko Agirre is Professor at the University of the Basque Country and member of the IXA Natural Language Processing group. His research focuses on lexical and computational semantics, with applications in information retrieval and machine translation. He has been president of SIGLEX, member of the editorial board of Computational Linguistics, and has received a Google research award. -
Costas Bekas, Distinguished Research Staff Member, IBM Research – Zurich
Costas Bekas manages the Foundations of Cognitive Computing group at IBM Research – Zurich. Costas’ research covers high-performance computing, massive scale analytics and cognitive computing. He is a recipient of the PRACE Award (2012) and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (2013 & 2015). -
Iryna Gurevych, Professor, Technical University of Darmstadt
Iryna Gurevych is Professor for Language Processing at Technical University of Darmstadt, and Director of the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab. Her research aims at lexical-semantics, resources and algorithms, and innovative applications of language processing to social sciences and humanities. -
Hristo Tanev, Researcher, European Commission, Joint Research Centre
Hristo Tanev, PhD, has been working in the domain of Natural Language Processing for more than 25 years already. His work has been concentrated mostly in the area of Question Answering, Terminology Extraction, Grammar Induction, and Event Extraction. Being researcher and developer of working applications, Hristo Tanev's work resulted in several software systems for Question Answering, Event Extraction and Terminology Learning.
Program
SwissText 2018 is a two-day conference on automatic text analytics. The conference will see keynotes and presentations by distinguished international experts from research and industry, and a poster exhibition of recent research results. It will be also enriched by tutorials and hands-on workshops targetting a broad audience. Furthermore, proceedings are planed for scientific submissions. We are currently preparing the Call for Papers. Please contact us at info@swisstext.org if you want to get notified when it's published.
The program committee has decided on the submissions, here is the list of accepted papers.
Workshops
Data Expedition into the Swiss Twitter Community
More infos at Data Expedition Website
Day: Tuesday, 12.06.2018
NLP Clinic
More infos at NLP Clinic Website
Day: Wednesday, 13.06.2018
Future Actions for Swiss German
More infos at Future Actions for Swiss German
Day: Wednesday, 13.06.2018
Schedule 2>
Tuesday
Wednesday
8:30 | Registration + Coffee/Gipfeli | |||
9:00 | Welcome Message: Mark Cieliebak | |||
9:30 | Keynote: Costas Bekas (IBM) | |||
10:15 | Break | |||
10:45 | Parallel Sessions | |||
Track 3 Room: TN E0.46 | Track 4 Room: TN E0.54 | Track 5 Room: TN E0.58 | ||
Noëmi Aepli and Simon Clematide: Parsing Approaches for Swiss German | Ethan Brown and Saurabh Jain: Recommendations from Unstructured Data for Investment Banking | Sibylle Peuker: "What can I ask you?” - The User Experience of Conversational Interfaces | ||
Donat Agosti: Text and Data Minining Workflow to Make Scientific Publications Accessible | Albert Weichselbraun, Philipp Kuntschik, Norman Süsstrunk, Fabian Odoni, Sandro Hörler and Adrian M.P. Brasoveanu: Optimizing Information Acquisition and Decision Making Processes with Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Visual Analytics. | Khalil Mrini, Marc Laperrouza and Pierre Dillenbourg: Building a Question-Answering Chatbot Using Forum Data in the Semantic Space | ||
Markus S.T. Pilzecker: Automatic Hyperlinking on a Juridicial Corpus via an RDFized Terminology | Lorenz Bernauer and Patrick Bernauer: Auto-generated Email Responses: Boost your Email Efficiency | Jacky Casas, Nathan Quinteiro Quintas, Elena Mugellini and Omar Abou Khaled: Rupert the Nutritionist, the Efficient Conversational Agent | ||
12:15 | Lunch Break | |||
13:30 | Poster Presentations | |||
13:45 | Hate Speech Hackathon Organizers: FHNW and ZHAW Room: TN 02.29 | Workshop: NLP Clinic Organizer: Swiss Alliance for Data-intensive Services Room: TS 03.08 | Workshop: Future Actions for Swiss German Organizers: University of Zurich and Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) Room: TS 01.07 | |
15:30 | Poster Session and Exhibition Open Time to visit the Exhibition and Posters | |||
16:00 | Keynote: Hristo Tanev (ECJRC) | |||
16:45 | Closing Statement | |||
17:15 | Apero | |||
The full program and presentation abstracts are available in the Program Booklet.
Impressions
Presentations
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Welcome Message
Mark Cieliebak
ZHAW
slides (pdf)
video -
Disentangling the Thoughts: Latest News in Computational Argumentation
Iryna Gurevych
TU Darmstadt
slides (pdf)
video -
A Genetic Algorithm for Combining Visual and Textual Embeddings Evaluated on Attribute Recognition
Ruiqi Li
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
video -
Bilingual Term Extraction with Big Data
Rémy Blättler and Jan Deriu
Supertext, ZHAW
slides (pptx)
video -
On the Effectiveness of Feature Set Augmentation using Clusters of Word Embeddings
Georgios Balikas
Kelkoo
video -
Encoder-Decoder Methods for Text Normalization
Massimo Lusetti and Tatyana Ruzsics
University of Zurich
slides (pdf)
video -
Automated Detection of Adverse Drug Reactions in the Biomedical Literature Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Biomedical Word Embeddings
Diego Saldana
Novartis Pharma A.G.
slides (pptx)
video -
Text Zoning for Job Advertisements with Bidirectional LSTMs
Ann-Sophie Gnehm
University of Zurich
video -
Posters
slides (pdf)
video -
Cross-linguality and machine translation without bilingual data
Eneko Agirre
University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
slides (pdf)
video -
Welcome message second day (13.06.2018)
slides (pdf)
video -
Cognitive Discovery: How AI (with NLP) is changing technical R&D
Costas Bekas
IBM Research
video -
Recommendations from Unstructured Data for Investment Banking
Saurabh Jain
Squirro
video -
“What can I ask you?” - The User Experience of Conversational Interfaces
Sibylle Peuker
Zeix
slides (pdf)
video -
Text and Data Minining Workflow to Make Scientific Publications Accessible
Donat Agosti
Plazi
video -
Automatic Hyperlinking on a Juridicial Corpus via an RDFized Terminology
Markus Pilzecker
Die Wissens-Ingenieure
slides (pdf)
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Optimizing Information Acquisition and Decision Making Processes with Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Visual Analytics.
Albert Weichselbraun
University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur
slides (pdf)
video -
Building a Question-Answering Chatbot Using Forum Data in the Semantic Space
Khalil Mrini
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
video -
Auto-generated Email Responses: Boost your Email Efficiency
Lorenz Bernauer
Mailytica
slides (pdf)
video -
Rupert the Nutritionist, the Efficient Conversational Agent
Nathan Quinteiro Quintas
Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
slides (pdf)
video -
Multiliingual Event Detection in the Europe Media Monitor
Hristo Tanev
European Commission, Joint Research Centre
slides (pptx)
video -
Closing Session
Mark Cieliebak
ZHAW
slides (pdf)
video
Venue
SwissText will be held on the 12th and 13th of June 2018 in the ZHAW Eulachpassage in Winterthur (same location as last year).
The venue is located in the historic heart of the city, a 5 minutes’ walk from Winterthur main railway station and has a directly attached parking deck.
Address: Building TN at ZHAW Campus Winterthur, Technikumstrasse 71
Directions: Google Maps, ZHAW Location map
Registration
Registration deadline | May 20, 2018 |
Single Day Early Bird Participation Fee, until 30.4.2018 | CHF 130.– |
Full Conference Early Bird Participation Fee, until 30.4.2018 | CHF 240.– |
Single Day Participation Fee | CHF 160.– |
Full Conference Participation Fee | CHF 280.– |
Discount for students on request. Send email to info@swisstext.org
Conference Registration includes:
- Admission to all sessions
- Please when registering select workshops, since only a limited number of places are available
- Coffee and refreshment breaks
- Lunch
- Conference apero
- Proceedings
Organization
Conference Chair: Mark Cieliebak
Organizers: Fernando Benites, Jan Deriu, Amrita Prasad, Don Tuggener, Dirk von Grünigen, Ada Wan, Pamela Hunziker
The conference is co-organized by Zurich University of Applied Sciences and the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services.
Program Committees
The detailed list can be found here.Sponsors
Partners
Additional partners are always welcome. Please contact us at info@swisstext.org.
Mailing List
Please use the following to subscribe to the SwissText mailing list in order to keep updated with the latest news:
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