Knowledge Café

LREC Conference

FutureTDM was presented at the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation on May 24, 2016. We held a very well attended FutureTDM Knowledge Cafe to discuss text-and data- mining (TDM) experiences with the conference participants. Attendees were also treated to the ‘premiere’ of the FutureTDM animated video.

As with some of the previous Knowledge Cafes, researchers mentioned how they find it difficult to know where to go with their questions about TDM within their institutions. Questions such as where to find available TDM tools and how to actually use them?

“ People from all disciplines should have access to data analytics tools”

One topic that was discussed at various tables was the need for standards. TDM needs standards, but it is most important that such standards are used as soon as they become available. Having incentives for the community to adopt and actually use a standard is something that has been raised in previous Knowledge Cafe’s.

But there were also some more specific topics. Given the focus of the conference, it is not surprising that a lot of the discussions centered on barriers relevant to the NLP community. Technologies for transforming analog textual data into digital are needed and specific TDM techniques are required to be able to do this. Another main topic was language and how a horizontal infrastructure with data and tools for all languages is needed. These TDM infrastructures should also be accessible to companies, so that the entry barrier to TDM is lowered by making available the necessary basic language and TM processing tools.

We’d like to thank the LREC conference organisers for their work with us on this initiative and look forward to the next Knowledge Cafes to be held in Berlin, Warsaw and Helsinki.

Taking note of all the specific barriers the participants mentioned we will use this information to further develop our reports and finally the recommendations how to improve TDM in Europe. Be sure to follow @FutureTDM to be the first to know when our publications are made available.

For more information about LREC visit the website and the #lrec2016 hashtag on Twitter.