ZurichNLP #7

Happy new year! We are kicking off 2024 with Meetup #7 on January 16th! It’s our pleasure to announce the following speakers:

• Martina Forster and Luca Campanella from Typewise
• Tiago Pimentel from ETH Zurich

RSVP soon as spots are limited, the last few times we maxed out capacity. Talk details:

Speaker #1: Martina Forster and Luca Campanella

Title: Life in an NLP Startup: A Glimpse into Typewise’s Journey in Revolutionizing Customer Service Abstract: Ever wondered what it’s like to work in an NLP startup in Switzerland? Join us as we share our experiences at Typewise, a Zurich-based startup that’s transforming customer service with AI. We’ll give you a taste of our day-to-day, the challenges we face, and the excitement of working in the rapidly evolving field of NLP. You’ll also get a sneak peek of our text prediction technology and how it’s making customer service communication more efficient. Plus, we’ll dive into one of the NLP tasks we work on – Grammatical Error Correction. If you’re curious about the practical applications of AI and the realities of working in an NLP startup, this talk is for you.

Speaker #2: Tiago Pimentel

Title: Revisiting the Optimality of Word Lengths Zipf posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances’ communicative costs. He supported this claim by showing that words’ lengths are inversely correlated with their frequencies. This correlation, however, is only expected if one assumes that a words’ communicative cost is given by its length. We explore this assumption, comparing the predictive power over word lengths we get when assuming different operationalisations of communicative cost.

Hope to see you there!