On the Way to TaCoS

I’d like to point out to everyone that we now have a detailed map of the TaCoS 28 location. You can find this on our location page, or simply below. Please refer to this when trying to find us, especially because on Friday, the TaCoS proceedings share the Griebnitzsee location with the University Information Day, which is wonderful, but which also means you can’t just go where all the people are and expect to find us.

Also, a quick note from the webmaster: When we closed registration, we closed it a little too hard, so some of you couldn’t check their registration status anymore. That works again now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Deep Learning in NLP: A Teaser Trailer

Here we would like to feature the saturday workshop, given by Jens Johannsmeier. You can look forward to a 2 hour, interactive preview of deep learning. But don’t let me tell you, Jens actually had some words to say himself.
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The whole thing will be very high-level/conceptual in nature. If you have previous experience in deep learning you might not get much out of it. Also, don’t expect to walk out of the workshop being able to train your own models. In fact, no coding is planned at all so far. Some prior knowledge in machine learning in general should be useful, and you shouldn’t be afraid of a little bit of maths.
The idea is to give a brief intro to “classical” machine learning (feature engineering + linear models) and show how deep learning improves over some of its aspects, as well as introducing some more specialized model types (recurrent/convolutional networks). We will be looking at toy examples as well as speech recognition and sentiment analysis as NLP applications. Procedure-wise, it will be a mix between “lecture” and little exercises.

Jens is quite adamant about the workshop having a specific audience. If you know this stuff, or it isn’t for you, why not enjoy the summer morning in Potsdam. I tend to agree. He has more to say.

The overall goal is not to take first steps in deep learning or something like that (that’s why there’s no coding), but to give people an idea of whether deep learning is something worth checking out for them — for their research or for fun. It could also be interesting if you’ve seen the hype surrounding it in recent times and just want it de-mystified a bit.

I still have about a week to prepare, so if you’re interested in the workshop and would really like to hear about a specific topic, feel free to message me (johannsmeier@uni-potsdam.de) and I might be able to work it in, but since we only have two hours I can’t guarantee anything.

There you go. Sounds like a workshop to me.

Registration coming to a close!

Just a quick heads up to everybody. We have decided to close registration to attend TaCoS 28 on Friday, June 1st. So if you are still deliberating wether to register: Hurry up! The gates are closing.

Opening our Couch Surfing Bazaar

Have you noticed that lodging in the Potsdam/Berlin area around this time of year can be rather pricey? Well, a bunch of our attendees have, and so, because of popular demand, we decided that, while we cannot provide comprehensive sleeping arrangements, we can at least help facilitate such arrangements among students. So if you are looking for a couch to stay on, consult our couch surfing bazaar. If you are a student of the University of Potsdam, please consider helping out by offering a bed to sleep in. Or a couch. Or a friendly piece of cardboard. It’s appreciated!

Early Bird phase concluding

With May just around the corner, the Early Bird phase for registration is coming to a close, and, with it, the 5€ attendance fee discount. We were very happy to see that there were, indeed, many early birds among the flock of our attendants. Starting tomorrow, registrations will proceed with the usual fee of 20€.

Don’t worry, though! You may still avoid payment entirely by giving a presentation.

Announcing the 28th TaCoS in Potsdam!

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We are delighted to announce that the 28th “Tagung der Computerlinguistik Studierenden” (Meetup of Computational Linguistics Students) will be held at the University of Potsdam. As was decided last year in Stuttgart, the TaCoS thereby returns to Potsdam after its long and sunny stay in the south. Proceedings will be from June 8th to June 10th. For more information, please refer to our scheduling and location pages – but before you do so, don’t forget to register to attend the TaCoS.

Oh, and while you’re already perusing the wide variety of attractions in Potsdam and Berlin, consider committing to a presentation. If you act fast, slots might still be available!