Café scientifique – Artificial intelligence: serving all languages

The European School of Helsinki will be hosting for the occasion.

The speakers will remind us of what AI is, how it works, and what challenges and opportunities it represents. They will among other things describe how AI can support the analysis and automatic interpretation of all human languages.

Their works also specifically cover languages that are not referenced in dictionaries and grammar books, which enables to avoid typing errors (in text messages and on social media), optical character recognition errors linked to digitalization, and the different registers and variants. This approach enabled them to carry out the NewsEye European project on old press from 1850 to 1950 in French, Finnish, Swedish, German, and English.

The conference will be held in English. It will be followed by a moment of exchange with the public, as well as a convivial moment.

Antoine Doucet is professor at La Rochelle Université since 2014. His research lies at the intersection between information seeking, natural language processing, text data mining (TDM), and AI. In this context, his works aim for the development of scale up methods using as few external resources as possible in order to be applicable to any drafting language and any type of document, from print media to social media, and from native digital document to digitized old manuscripts. Antoine Doucet is furthemore the 2023 winner of the France-Nokia Chaire d’Excellence.

Hannu Toivonen is professor at the University of Helsinki. He is a leading expert in the fields of data mining and creative computing. He introduced and solved several new research problems in data mining since the birth of this field in the early 1990’s; his definitions and his algorithms have become standard references in this field and have been published in manuals. Since then, he has developed data mining applications dedicated to genome mapping, context-aware computing, document analysis and summarization, creative computing, and natural language generation (NLG).