The SwissText conference series was launched by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in 2016. The first edition was already a huge success with more than 170 participants. In 2020, the conference was handed over to the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing (SwissNLP), which now organizes the conference in collaboration with different Swiss universities. Due to the ongoing Corona crisis, we were again forced to hold SwissText as an online conference. Based on our experience from 2020 -- where we had to switch to the online setting at very short notice -- we were better prepared this time and included several activities in the program that allowed the participants to interact and network in the online setting: a “Battle of NLP Ideas”,”Surprise Networking” for NLP experts, and a virtual poster and sponsor exhibition. In addition, there were 34 presentations in the form of talks, posters, and demos. The conference was accompanied by three shared tasks: The results of the first two shared tasks were presented at the conference, while the third unfortunately did not receive any submissions. In addition, Swisstext hosted three pre-conference workshops: - 2nd European Language Grid (ELG) Workshop - NLP in Finance - NLP efforts against COVID-19 in Switzerland We received 38 submissions for scientific, applied, and demo presentations. You will find the full scientific papers and abstracts of the applied talks and posters in separate sections in these proceedings. A great addition to the conference program were the “Highlights Talks”, where researchers presented outstanding ideas and insights in new NLP approaches from other top conferences. We would like to thank our keynote speakers Sebastian Welter (Accenture), Lucia Specia (Imperial College London), Lewis Tunstall (Huggingface), Zenodia Charpy and Adam Grzywaczewski (both NVIDIA). Their perspectives and contributions are much appreciated. A big thank you also to our workshop organizers and the organizers of the shared tasks, and to all members of our programme committees for their excellent work.
We are grateful to our sponsors and partners, who supported us in this unusual setting. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the generous support by Innosuisse (the Swiss Innovation Agency) and our co-organizer, the data innovation alliance.
Last but foremost, we would like to thank Manuela Hürlimann and Fernando Benites, who were the main organizers. They were assisted by Michel, Marc, Don, Claudio, Yanick, Alla, and many more for various tasks. Without them this conference would not have been possible! Further, we are thankful for the support of the programme committees for the scientific and applied track.
It was a great pleasure for us to organize and chair this conference. We hope that all participants enjoyed the conference as much as we did! Mark Cieliebak and Manfred Vogel Conference Chairs The SwissText 2021 Conference was organized by the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing (SwissNLP), the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwest Switzerland (FHNW), and the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), and co-organized by the Swiss Alliance for Data-Intensive Services.
Mark Cieliebak and Manfred Vogel
Manuela Hürlimann and Fernando Benites
Michel Plüss Marc Cuni Don Tuggener Claudio Paonessa Yanick Schraner Alla Stöckli Program Committees Applied and Demo Track: - Jacky Casas, HES-SO - Andrei Popescu-Belis, HEIG-VD
Mark Cieliebak, ZHAW Daniele Puccinelli, SUPSI Egon Werlen, FFHS Philipp Dreesen, ZHAW Manfred Vogel, FHNW Hatem Ghorbel, HES-SO Albert Weichselbraun, FHGR Severin Klingler, ETH
Daniel Pfäffli, HSLU Scientific Track: