1st UniDive training school

• Event title: 1st UniDive training school
• Location: Chișinău, Moldova (relocated from Jerusalem, Israel)
• Date: 8-12 July 2024
• Location: Technical University of Moldova
• Local Organizers: Victoria Bobicev & Olesea Caftanatov

The following input is available:

• instructions about how to prepare the prerequisites for the courses
• Github repository (it will be gradually updated with the training material)
• list of accepted trainees' projects
• instructions for personal introductions
• instructions for poster presenters
• top tourist attractions of Chișinău

The courses considered for this training school include:

• Dependency syntax, Surface-Syntactic UD and UD - by Sylvain Kahane
• Annotation of multiword expressions for newcomers - by Verginica Mititelu and Voula Giouli
• Corpus annotation infrastructure - by Bruno Guillaume, Daniel Zeman and Agata Savary

Additionally, the program will include:

• a brainstorming hackaton on topics submitted by the trainees
• posters of selected trainees' projects
• social events

Location: The tutorials, practical sessions and other school activities will take place at the Computers, Informatics and Microelectronics Faculty, Technical University of Moldova, see faculty building on the map.

• Please, be aware that Moldova is not in European Union yet.
• Local currency in Moldova is Moldovan leu, it costs roughly 5 euro cents rate. You can change some cash in the airport; in some cases, you have to pay cash, for example in local transport.
• Your European mobile cards will be in roaming in Moldova, be careful to check how much it will cost you to call or use mobile internet. Fortunately, you can often catch wifi in the airport, at the University, in café, etc.
• Moldova follows Eastern European Summer Time, 3 hours ahead from the UTC universal time.

• There is only one airport in Moldova: Chisinau airport. Plenty of air companies are flying to Chisinau: Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa, Turkish companies, WizzAir, LOT Polish airlines, Eurowings, HiSky, FlyUp and some others. We have to warn you to be cautious with FlyOne company, it often change or cancel their flights.
• You can use taxi from the airport although the taxi drivers that are waiting there and catching arriving people ask for much higher price than if you call a taxi using an app. If you want to save some money, you can use the trolleybus number 30 that stops right in front of airport building and will take you straight to the city center. The only problem with this trolleybus that it goes every half an hour; so you have to wait.
• In the city buses and trolleybuses you pay directly in the transport, it costs 6 lei, around 30 cents. You can use Google maps or EasyWay app to navigate using local transport.
• Taxi is comparatively cheap; you can use hip taxi to call a taxi for example although there are other taxi apps like Letz or Yandex Go.

There are many hotels in the Chisinau city; you can use booking.com, travel.md or hotels.md to book one. Unfortunately, there are not hotels close to the school venue. The closest one we recommend is Insitutul Muncii Hotel. Other hotels are:

• Shadow Hotel;
• City Park Hotel;

Also there are many possibilities to rent an apartment close to the school venue, for example:

• Apartment OneClickRenrt Oasis Booking link
• Flatkeepers - city view Booking link
• Apartment Deluxe on Moscow Avenue, Booking link
• Retreat Studio Booking link

The cheapest accommodation is in the university dormitories next to the faculty building but most of them has been offered to the refugees from Ukraine and they are still living there. If you intend to book the room in the dormitory write directly to organizers (victoria.bobicev@ia.utm.md) but be aware that the price is really low (5 euro/day) but the conditions are frugal.

Apply by: May 1, 2024

We are happy to announce the 1st edition of UNIDIVE Summer School on Universality, Diversity and Idiosyncrasy in Language Technology. It is dedicated mainly (but not exclusively) to young researchers and investigators. Researchers working on low-resourced languages, dialects and varieties are particularly welcome. See below for the application details.

Each applicant should submit a project for a construction of a resource related to the topics of the training school (e.g. a new/enhanced UD treebank, a new PARSEME corpus, a resource adding a new annotation layer on top of a UD/PARSEME corpus, etc.). The length of the application should be 2 pages (excluding references). The application should contain:

• The title
• Applicant’s name and affiliation (including the country)
• A list of 3-4 key-words
• Description of a resource related to the topics of the training school
• Explanation how the participation in the training school will be useful for the project
• Open questions related to the project which could be addressed during the brainstorming hackathon
• Short statement of the project phase (planning, started, in the process of creation)

The projects are to be submitted via the OpenReview portal.

• Trainee's applicatioon due the 1st of May, 2024
• Acceptance notification on 22nd May, 2024
• Invitaions: 22-25 May, 2024
• Summer school: 8-12 July 2024

We can fund about 40 trainees to come to Chișinău (additionally to local trainees). In case of a larger number of candidates, the selection criteria will include:

• Trainee’s country: trainees only from COST countries and Near-Neighbour Countries can be funded. See here and here.
• Age (Young Researchers and Invesitgators, i.e. under the age of 40, are promoted)
• Gender and geographical balance (notably between Inclusiveness Target Countries and others COST countries)
• Relevance and quality of the project submitted by the trainee
• Status of the language on which the trainee intends to work (low-resourced languages, dialects or genres are promoted)

If you are not selected on the basis of these criteria and you can find other financial sources to cover your travel, accommodation and meals, you are also welcome to participate.

The authors of the selected projects may optionally present them in a poster session during the Training School.

• Victoria Bobicev
• Olesea Caftanatov
• Atul Kr. Ojha
• Agata Savary

https://unidive.lisn.upsaclay.fr/doku.php?id=instructions_project_presenters

• List of Top Attractions in Chișinău