The CLARIN annual conference 2017 took place on 18-20 September at the Hotel Flamenco, Budapest, Hungary. It is the main annual event for those working on the construction and operation of CLARIN infrastructure across Europe, as well as for representatives of the communities of use in the humanities and social sciences. The conference was attended by 167 participants who were authors of accepted papers, members of national consortia and representatives of CLARIN centres as well as representatives from partner organizations. The 2017 edition of the event was organised by CLARIN in collaboration with the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
DAY 1
On Monday 18 September 2017 the conference opening ceremony took place in the afternoon with a welcome messages from Franciska de Jong (Executive Director), Maciej Piasecki (Programme Chair) and Tamás Váradi (Local Organizer). The highlight of the ceremony was Tamás’s reminder of the roots of CLARIN being in the city of Budapest! He called it the ‘Home Town of CLARIN’ as the Preparatory Meeting was held at the Institute in Budapest back in the 2006. After this interesting journey down the memory lane, the first keynote was given by Karina van Dalen-Oskam (University of Amsterdam / Huygens ING) on Literary translations and tools for stylometric research. Afterwards, the first paper session took place with two papers. For the abstracts, full papers and slides please visit the conference programme page.
The first day of the conference wrapped with a reception at the Academy Club based in the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. It was a remarkable event in a spectacular setting - the building is located by the Danube River overlooking the 19th-century suspension bridge, called the Chain Bridge, designed by William Tierney Clark and illuminated at night.
DAY 2
The second day of the conference started with presentations by CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors, represented by Bente Maegaard (slides) and Koenraad De Smedt (slides) discussing the State of the Infrastructure. It was a short session, though filled with a lot of information and updates on the Infrastructure’s progress and development, the National Coordinator’s Forum and national activities. This was followed by two paper sessions (6 papers in total) and short reports on the Committees meetings, by the respective chairs: Assessment Committee, by Lene Offersgaard (slides) and Standards Committee, by Piotr Banski (slides). The next presentation introduced CLARIN activities in Hungary, followed by the CLARIN Bazaar, which provided an informal setting for conversations between CLARIN people and space to showcase ongoing work and exchange ideas. This year’s Bazaar consisted of 35 presentations. Click here to read more about the Bazaar.
The afternoon was all about the theme: Multilingual Processing for Social Sciences and Humanities. This thematic session started with a keynote by Piek Vossen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) entitled From multilingual to cross-lingual processing for Social Sciences and Humanities, followed by two thematic papers.
The second day of the conference ended with a conference dinner at the Zsófia Event Boat, which gathered all participants together for an evening cruise on the Danube overlooking beautifully illuminated bridges and buildings of the city along the river.
DAY 3
The last, fourth paper session of the conference took place on Wednesday morning with 4 papers presented, followed by a Poster slam - a fast paced presentation of the posters (1 minute per presenter!). It was followed by a more relaxed part of the conference: poster and demo session (10 in total). This was one of those times at the conference, where people could chat and exchange ideas for hours! After a lunch break the State of the Technical Infrastructure was presented by Menzo Windhouwer on behalf of Dieter Van Uytvanck, and followed by the 4th edition of the Award ceremony. The 2017 Steven Krauwer Award for CLARIN Achievements was awarded to Paul Meurer (Uni Research Computing, Norway) and you can read about the motivation of the Jury here.
The last part of the conference included final remarks and ‘Looking forward’ message from the Board of Directors, represented by Franciska de Jong and Darja Fišer, followed by acknowledgments and goodbye from the Programme Chair, Maciej Piasecki.
COMMITTEE MEETINGS
The event was also an opportunity for several CLARIN-internal committees, to meet, follow up on the current work and plan ahead. The meetings took place before and after the main conference and included the following:
- National Coordinators Forum ( )
- Standing Committee for CLARIN Technical Centres ( )
- Component Metadata Infrastructure ( ) / Curation TF
- Centre Assessment Committee
- Standards Committee
- Legal and Ethical Issues Committee
- User Involvement group & Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure Committee (joint meeting)
- Scientific Advisory Board
MORE INFORMATION
For more detailed information about the event visit the CLARIN 2017 Annual Conference page, where you can find links to the programme, abstracts, full papers and more.
Visit the CLARIN 2017 IN PICTURES album of photographs taken during the conference to see familiar faces and smiles!
To follow up on CLARIN 2017 activity on Twitter see our Storify story here.
Accepted papers were published in the conference Book of Abstracts, and the Proceedings. Selected full papers will be published in a digital conference proceedings volume at Linköping University Electronic Press within about 6 months after the conference. Once available, a direct link to the publication will be added to the conference page.
More information about previous CLARIN Annual Conferences can be found here.
