Artificial Intelligence is booming! AI and Machine Learning classes are overcrowded, startups are founded everywhere, and not a single day goes by without breaking news from the field. The same applies to Text Analytics. Tremendous progress is made every year: for instance, machine translation has been shifted to a new level by DeepL, automatic speech recognition has reached almost human level, and Google just announced its autonomous calling agent Duplex. These lighthouse projects raise interest in Text Analytics in general, and both industrial and academic experts perceive increased need for NLP applications and solutions. Fittingly, the Swiss Text Analytics Conference (SwissText) grew in several directions in the last three years, and we are now proud to present the first published proceedings of this years edition.
The first idea for a Swiss conference on Text Analytics was born soon after the Swiss Data Science Conference in 2015, where we successfully organized an interactive track on Twitter analysis. But would there really be sufficient interest for a stand-alone conference on text analytics? Initially, we were hoping for merely 50 participants and some talks from our close community. Instead, we were positively overwhelmed: The first SwissText conference was supported by more than 15 research groups and sponsors, we had high-quality presentations and keynotes from academia and industry, and more than 170 participants!
The major goals of SwissText were - and still are - to bring together practitioners and researchers, to give an overview of existing solutions and technologies in automatic text understanding/natural language processing/computational linguistics, and to provide ample time for networking and discussions. With this aim, and based on the positive feedback from the first year, we kept the major setting in the second year, attracting again over 180 participants.
For this year, we decided to grow and extend SwissText in three major aspects: First and foremost, the conference ran for two days instead of one. This allowed us to accept more presentations and posters, while maintaining the interactive spirit of the conference. We added three interactive workshops and a hackathon, which gave additional opportunities for networking and interaction. Finally, we decided to open the conference to standard scientific papers: We split submissions into an applied Swiss Track and an international Scientific Track, we established a double-blind review process with 50 international NLP experts in the program committee, and we are publishing these conference proceedings now.
These proceedings of the 3rd Swiss Text Analytics Conference 2018 (SwissText-2018) consist of three parts: • Part 1: Full Scientific Papers (peer-reviewed) • Part 2: Workshop Results • Part 3: Abstracts of Applied Posters and Papers (not peer-reviewed)
The scientific papers were selected in a standard double-blind peer-review process. We received 12 submissions in the Scientific Track of the conference, out of which 8 papers were selected by the international program committee. Two additional papers were invited after the conference, based on their excellent presentation at the conference. These two papers also went through the same review process.
SwissText 2018 also had a Swiss Track, where we invited submissions of results with a strong focus on Swiss industry and research. Each submission had to have a certain ”Swissness” factor, which could be, for instance, that the authors are located in Switzerland, the project provides solutions for one (or more) of the languages of Switzerland (including Swiss dialects), the product focuses primarily on the Swiss market etc. Submission consisted of a simple one-page abstract, and were selected by a second program committee which comprised Swiss experts in text analytics.
In the third part of these proceedings, we publish the results of two interactive events that were run during the conference: The Workshop on Future Actions for Swiss German, and the Data Expedition into the Swiss Twitter Community. These two papers report the main findings and results during the workshops (not peer-reviewed).
There was a tremendous amount of work necessary to make this conference happen. First of all, I would like to thank the local organizing committee in Winterthur for their support and great work. They have spent literally hundreds of hours of their precious time, and without them this conference would not have been possible. Thank you, Fernando, Don, Dirk, Jan, Amrita, Pam, and Ada!
In addition, I would like to thank all keynote speakers, speakers and poster presenters for their contributions, the organizers of the workshops for their excellent work, and the members of our program committees for their constructive and valuable feedback which helped to compile an appealing and interesting program for the conference.
Finally, we are grateful to our partners and sponsors for their generous support, and to Zurich University of Applied Sciences for hosting the conference on their campus.
It was a great pleasure for me to organize and chair this conference, and I am already looking forward to the next edition of the Swiss Text Analytics conference!
The 3rd Swiss Text Analytics Conference was organized and hosted by Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, and co-organized by the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services.
Mark Cieliebak (chair) Fernando Benites Don Tuggener Dirk von Gru¨nigen Jan Deriu Amrita Prasad Pamela Hunziker Ada Wan
Ivo Blohm, University of St. Gallen Martin Jaggi, Ecole Polytechnique Fe´de´rale de Lausanne Aurelien Lucchi, ETH Zurich Roberto Mastropietro, Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI) Andrei Popescu-Belis, School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD) Fabio Rinaldi, University of Zurich Ju¨rgen Spielberger, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) Ju¨rgen Vogel, Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) Manfred Vogel, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW) Tim vor der Bru¨ck, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) Egon Werlen, Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences (FFHS)
Giuseppe Attardi, Universita` di Pisa Adrien Barbaresi, O¨sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (O¨ AW) Roberto Basili, University of Roma Tor Vergata Eduardo Blanco, University of North Texas Ivo Blohm, University of St. Gallen Noah Bubenhofer, University of Zurich Ernst Buchberger, Medical University of Vienna Manuel De Buenaga, Universidad Europea de Madrid Stephan Busemann, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Miriam Butt, Universita¨t Konstanz Pascual Cantos-Go´mez, University of Murcia Sylviane Cardey, Universite de Franche-Comte Ernesto William De Luca, Georg-Eckert-Institute for international Textbook Research
Hatem Ghorbel, University of Applied Sciences HES-SO, HE-Arc Inge´nierie Xavier Go´mez Guinovart, Universidade de Vigo Martin Jaggi, Ecole Polytechnique Fe´de´rale de Lausanne Manfred Klenner, University of Zurich Valia Kordoni, Humboldt University Berlin Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University Aurelien Lucchi, ETH Zurich Roberto Mastropietro, Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI) Alexander Mehler, Goethe University Frankfurt Wolfgang Menzel, University of Hamburg Margot Mieskes, University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt Marie-Francine Moens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Alessandro Moschitti, Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) Guenter Neumann, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Johann Petrak, The University of Sheffield Hannes Pirker, Austrian Academy of Sciences (O¨ AW) Andrei Popescu-Belis, School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD) Uwe Quasthoff, University Leipzig Fabio Rinaldi, University of Zurich Paolo Rosso, Universitat Polite`cnica de Vale`ncia Tanja Samardzic, University of Zurich Yves Scherrer, University of Helsinki Gerold Schneider, University of Zurich Rico Sennrich, The University of Edinburgh Marcin Skowron, Austrian Research Institute For Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) Ju¨rgen Spielberger, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) Angelika Storrer, Universita¨t Mannheim Manfred Vogel, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (FHNW) Juergen Vogel, Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) Tim vor der Bru¨ck, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) Egon Werlen, Swiss Distance University of Applied Sciences (FFHS) Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, University of Rome Tor Vergata Torsten Zesch, University of Duisburg-Essen Heike Zinsmeister, University of Hamburg Partners