Testimonies from UniDive members about the impact of the Action

Abigail Walsh (Dublin City University, Ireland)

I benefited from an STSM in England, where I developed an Irish resources targeting noun compounds. The impact of these resources is manifold. They are used in assessing the quality of machine translation engines and large language models (LLMs). They underlie a PhD project exploring rare and diverse phenomena that remain a challenge with current NLP models. They pave the way towards new collaboration between Ireland and France concerning LLM evaluation. They allowed me personally to build the research line of my post-doctoral project and to connect with many successful senior researchers in this field. —- == Amal Haddad Haddad (University of Granada, Spain) == I went for an STSM to Bulgaria in September 2024. The visit was very useful for me to understand new annotation methods. Hopefully, there will be future collaboration between the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the LexiCon research group at my university. —- == Kilian Evang (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) == Serving as a Task leader in this Action is being one of the most significant networking opportunities of my career so far, not least due to the large number of actively engaged participants (21 people at the last Task meeting). If successful, the Task will lead to at least one highly collaborative publication with high visibility due to the large number of authors, and to a set of guidelines that will be used by treebank creators for years to come. —- == Liudmila Mockienė (Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania) == The participation of the members of the Institute of Humanities in this COST action has contributed greatly to involvement of both early-career and more experienced researchers into the scientific activities of the department. This will also enhance internationalization of the research at our university, which is in line with our institutional strategic goals. The researchers have expanded their network of cooperation and developed their research skills, which helps the accreditation of the study programmes we deliver. —- == Omer Goldman (Bar Ilan University, Israel) === For me personally, the participation in UniDive COST Action already had, and will continue to have a great impact on my career. Being involved in the organization of the shared task expanded my network of close collaborators to include some of the leading researchers in NLP, and it will be much easier for me to engage in new collaborations even beyond the lifetime of the Action. In addition, coordinating a large scale project that involves a network of dozens of contributors is another piece of valuable experience that is available to only few in my career stage (last year PhD student). —- == Roberto Díaz Hernández (University of Jaén, Spain) == UniDive has given me the opportunity to meet scholars specialised in computational linguistics and to introduce concepts and methods from this discipline into Egyptian philology. Firstly, I have started to develop the first morphosyntactic treebank for pre-Coptic Egyptian. Secondly, I have opened a new line of research in Egyptian philology dedicated to the identification and analysis of multiword expressions in Egyptian. These two assets will contribute to the development of automatic morphosyntactic analysis of Egyptian texts for philologists and automatic translation of Egyptian inscriptions for archaeologists and visitors to Egypt. This will also help me become a professor after completing the ongoing junior professorship program. —- == Vahide Tajalli (Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, Iran) == I am an Iranian researcher working on Persian language. It is more than 2 years that I have been working with UniDive teams and It has helped me improve my vision of the similarities and differences among languages. Working with language specialists from different countries helps me have a more accurate analysis in my work. I hope someday we can have a UniDive meeting in Iran. —- == Verginica Mititelu (Romanian Academy, Bucarest, Romania) and Ivelina Stoyanova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria) == We presented jointly a tutorial on the annotation of multiword expressions as part of the international conference CLIB-2024 (Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria), drawing on our joint work within UniDive (as well as previous COST Action PARSEME). Joint activities facilitate the long-term collaboration between the individual researchers, like us, as well as between our institutions, both from inclusiveness target countries. The tutorial participants were from Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, Croatia, Latvia, and Spain, most of them ITCs, and working on low-resourced languages,