Blog post written by written by Petya Osenova (Sofia University)
The 30th edition of ESSLLI (European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information) took place from 6 to 17 August 2018 at Sofia University “Saint Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria.
The European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information is an event organized every year in a different European country under the auspices of the Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI). During the last 5 years ESSLLI was organized in: Toulouse, France (2017), Bolzano, Italy (2016), Barcelona, Spain (2015), Tübingen, Germany(2014) and Düsseldorf, Germany (2013).
Sofia University “Saint Kliment Ohridski” and the Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IICT-BAS), jointly hosted ESSLLI 2018. The chair of the local Organization Committee was prof. Petya Osenova (Sofia University and IICT-BAS) and the co-chair was assoc. prof. Kiril Simov (IICT-BAS).
ESSLLI 2018 was held under the patronage of Mrs. Yordanka Fandakova, Mayor of Sofia Capital Municipality.
The school program this year featured 41 high quality courses in the three interdisciplinary areas: Language and Computation; Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation. The chair of ESSLLI 2018 Program Committee was prof. Laura Kallmeyer (Düsseldorf University).The local PC chair was prof. Galia Angelova (IICT-BAS).The courses covered three levels: foundational, introductory and advanced. Additionally, 5 workshops were organized on various related topics as well as four evening lectures of prominent scientists in these fields. Last but not least, there a student session was held throughout the summer school where PhD and Master students presented their work. The programme as well as the course and workshop materials are available here.
There were around 350 participants from 40 countries all over the world. Most of them came from the Netherlands, Germany, France, the USA, Italy, UK, Japan, Russia but we also welcomed participants from Argentina, Canada, China, South Africa, Australia.
CLARIN was well represented at this edition during both weeks. In week 1 (6-10 August) it featured the course Neural Dependency Parsing of Morphologically-Rich Languages lead by prof. Erhard Hinrichs (University of Tuebingen, Scientific Coordinator of CLARIN-D), and Daniël de Kok (University of Tuebingen).
In week 2 (on 14 August) prof. Jan Odijk (Utrecht University), the national coordinator for the Netherlands in CLARIN, delivered an evening lecture under the title Boosting Linguistic Research with CLARIN.
The 31th edition of ESSLLI will be held from 5 to 16 August 2019 in Riga, Latvia.
We would like to thank CLARIN ERIC for supporting ESSLLI 2018 through its User Involvement initiative.
For more information, visit the ESSLLI 2018 event page.
