Event

The 28th International Conference on Natural Language & Information Systems

Date and time
Wednesday, 21 June 2023 -
Friday, 23 June 2023

Location
Kedleston Road, Derby Campus
Kedleston Road
Derby
DE22 1GB

About the event

The 28th International Conference on Natural Language and Information Systems will be held at the University of Derby, United Kingdom and will be a face to face.

Since 1995, the Natural Language to Data Bases (NLDB) conference brings together researchers, industry practitioners, and potential users interested in various applications of Natural Language in the Database and Information Systems field. The term "Information Systems" has to be considered in the broader sense of Information and Communication Systems, including Big Data, Linked Data and Social Networks.

The field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently experienced several exciting developments. In research, these developments have been reflected in the emergence of neural language models (Deep Learning, Word Embeddings, Transformers) and the importance of aspects such as transparency, bias and fairness, a (renewed) interest in various linguistic phenomena, such as in discourse and argumentation mining, and in new problems such as the detection of disinformation and hate speech in social media, as well of mental health disorders that increased during the recent pandemic. Regarding applications, NLP systems have evolved to the point that they now offer real-life, tangible benefits to enterprises. Many of these NLP systems are now considered a de-facto offering in business intelligence suites, such as algorithms for recommender systems and opinion mining/sentiment analysis.

It is against this backdrop of recent innovations in NLP and its applications in information systems that the 28th edition of the NLDB conference takes place. 

Conference Chairs:

  • Manning Warren, University of Derby, UK
  • Métais Elisabeth, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France
  • Meziane Farid, University of Derby, UK

Program Chairs:

  • Reiff-Marganiec Stephan, University of Derby, UK
  • Sugumaran Vijayan, Oakland University, Rochester, USA

Programme Committee:

  • Abdi Asad, University of Derby, UK
  • Akoka Jacky, CNAM & TEM, France
  • Alzoub Alaa i, University of Derby
  • Anselma Luca, University of Turin, Italy
  • Bajaj Ahsaas, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
  • Balakrishna Mithun, Limba Corp, USA
  • Banerjee Somnath, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Basile Valerio University of Turin, Italy
  • Ben Said Rim, University of Sfax, Tunisia
  • Bensalem Imene, MISC Lab, Constantine 2 University, Algeria
  • Braschler Martin, ZHAW School of Engineering, Switzerland
  • Buscaldi Davide, University Sorbonne Paris Nord, France
  • Cabrio Elena, Université Côte d’Azur, Inria, CNRS, I3S, France
  • Chiky Raja 3DS Outscale, France
  • Chiruzzo Luis, Universidad de la República, Uruguay
  • Cimiano Philipp, Bielefeld University, Germany
  • Croce Danilo, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Italy
  • Farid Mohsen University of Derby
  • Fersini Elisabetta, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
  • Florio Komal, University of Turin, Italy
  • Fomichov Vladimir, Moscow Aviation Institute, Russia
  • Fornaciari Tommaso, Bocconi University Milan, Italy
  • Fouzi Harrag  Ferhat ABBAS Setif 1 University, Algeria
  • Franco Marc, Symanto, Germany/Spain
  • Frasincar Flavius, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
  • Guellil Imane, University of Edinburgh, UK
  • Gulla Jon Atle, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
  • Hacohen-Kerner Yaakov, Jerusalem College of Technology, Israel
  • Horacek Helmut, DFKI, Germany
  • Ienco Dino, IRSTEA, France
  • Iglesias Carlos A., Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
  • Ittoo Ashwin, HEC, Univ. of Liege, Belgium
  • Kamath Sowmya S, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, India
  • Kapetanios Epaminondas, University of Hertfordshire, UK
  • Kedad Zoubida, UVSQ, France
  • Klau Turowski, Otton-Von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
  • Kop Christian, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
  • Koufakou Anna, Florida Gulf Coast University, USA
  • Laatar Rim, University of Sfax, Tunisia
  • Lai Mirko, University of Turin, Italy
  • Liebeskind Chaya, Jerusalem College of Technology, Lev Academic Centre
  • Lopez Cédric, Emvista, Montpellier, France
  • Loukachevitch Natalia, Moscow State University, Russia
  • Makkar Aaisha, University of Derby
  • Mandl Thomas, University of Hildesheim, Germany
  • Manjula D, Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai, India
  • Martínez Paloma, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
  • Martínez Patricio, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
  • Martínez Unanue Raquel, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
  • Masmoudi Abir, LIUM, University of Le Mans, France
  • Mazzei Alessandro, University of Turin, Italy
  • Métais Elisabeth, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, France
  • Meziane Farid, University of Derby, UK
  • Mich Luisa, University of Trento, Italy
  • Mimouni Nada, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, France
  • Mitrović Jelena, University of Passau, Germany
  • Montalvo Soto, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
  • Montes y Gómez Manuel, INAOE Puebla, Mexico
  • Monti Johanna, L'Orientale University of Naples, Italy
  • Mughaz Dror Bar-Ilan University  Israel
  • Muñoz Rafael, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
  • Okky-Ibrohim Muhammad, University of Turin, Italy
  • Passaro Lucia, University of Pisa, Italy
  • Patti Viviana, University of Turin, Italy
  • Picca Davide, Columbia University, USA
  • Plaza Laura, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
  • Rangel Francisco, Symanto, Germany/Spain
  • Reyes Antonio, Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico
  • Roche Mathieu, Cirad, TETIS, France
  • Rosso Paolo, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
  • Saggion Horacio, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
  • Sakketou Flora, Philipps-Marburg University
  • Sanguinetti Manuela, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy
  • Shaalan Khaled The British University in Dubai, UAE
  • Silberztein Max, Université de Franche-Comté, France
  • Sprugnoli Rachele, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart Milan, Italy
  • Storey Veda, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
  • Sugumaran Vijayan, Oakland University, Rochester, USA
  • Tagarelli Andrea, University of Calabria, Italy
  • Taulé Mariona, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
  • Teisseire Maguelonne, Irstea, TETIS, France
  • Tomás David, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
  • Thirunarayan Krishnaprasad, Wright State University, Dayton, USA
  • Tufis Dan, RACAI, Bucharest, Romania
  • Turowski Klaus, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
  • Uban Ana Sabina, University of Bucharest, Romania
  • Ureña-López Alfonso, Universidad de Jaén, Spain
  • Vadera Sunil, University of Salford, UK
  • Valencia-Garcia Rafael, Universidad de Murcia, Spain
  • Villatoro Esaú, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland
  • Wattiau Isabelle, ESSEC, France
  • Yu Harry University of Derby UK
  • Zaghouani Wajdi, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
  • Zubiaga Arkaitz, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Guest speaker

Professor Yulan He

Yulan He is a Professor at the Department of Informatics at King’s College London. She is currently holding a prestigious five-year UKRI Turing AI Fellowship. Yulan’s research interests lie in the integration of machine learning and natural language processing for text analytics.

She has published over 200 papers on topics including natural language understanding, sentiment analysis, topic and event extraction, question-answering, fake news detection, biomedical text mining, and social media analytics. She has received several prizes and awards, including an SWSA Ten-Year Award, a CIKM 2020 Test-of-Time Award, and AI 2020 Most Influential Scholar Honourable Mention.

She has served as the General Chair for AACL-IJCNLP 2022 and a Program Co-Chair for EMNLP 2020. Yulan obtained her PhD degree in Spoken Language Understanding from the University of Cambridge.

Abstract: Uncertainty Interpretation and Calibration of Language Models

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has shifted from fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) on task-specific data to prompt-based or in-context learning where a task description is embedded into the PLM input so that the same language model can be used for multiple tasks. PLMs have made significant progress in various tasks but overconfident predictions challenge their trustworthiness in practical applications. In-context learning is suitable for low-resource settings and uses a PLM to predict a missing token in a template for text classification.

However, PLMs based on transformer architecture generate similar output embeddings, making it hard to distinguish between fine-grained class labels. In this talk, Professor He will first present their work for interpreting uncertainties of PLM-based models' predictions. She will then introduce a novel calibration method for in-context learning, which transforms PLM-encoded embeddings to ensure distinguishability, enhancing the accuracy of PLM-based models for practical applications.

Best paper prize

Prizes will be given for the best paper submission. This will be sponsored by Springer, the editor of the NLDB 2023 conference proceedings. The prizes are as follows:

The call for papers is now closed. 

Springer, publishing company logo

Contact us

Please get in touch if you have any questions.

Conference agenda

Please note, the conference agenda is subject to change. If you would like a PDF copy of the agenda please contact us at conference@derby.ac.uk to request this. 

Day 1 - Wednesday 21 June 2023 

Time Session
8.45am Conference Registration
9.45am Welcome Message from the Conference Co-Chair Prof Farid Meziane
10am Invited Guest Speaker, Prof. Yulan He, King’s College London. Uncertainty Interpretation and Calibration of Language Models
11am Refreshments Break
11.30

Session 1 (Long Papers): Natural Language Applications

  • Text to Image Synthesis Using Bridge Generative Adversarial Network and Char CNN Model, Sudhakaran Gajendran, Arunarani Ar, Manjula D, and Vijayan Sugumaran
  • Prompt and Instruction-Based Tuning for Response Generation in Conversational Question Answering, Yujie Xing and Peng Liu
  • LonXplain: Lonesomeness as a Consequence of Mental Disturbance in Reddit Posts, Muskan Garg, Chandni Saxena, Debabrata Samanta, and Bonnie J. Dorr
1pm Lunch Break
2pm

Session 2 (Short Papers): Text Summarisation And Generation

  • Improving Context-Awareness on Multi-Turn Dialogue Modeling with Extractive Summarization Techniques, Yujie Xing and Jon Atle Gulla
  • Abstractive Summarization Based Question-Answer System for Structural Information, Menaka Pushpa Arthur, Thakor Jayraj Rameshchandra, and D. Manjula
  • How shall a machine call a thing?, Federico Torrielli, Amon Rapp, and Luigi Di Caro
  • Argument and Counter-Argument Generation: a Critical Survey, Xiaoou Wang, Elena Cabrio, and Serena Villata

Session 3 (Short Papers): Language Models And Applications

  • Leveraging Small-BERT and Bio-BERT for Abbreviation Identification in Scientific Text, Piyush Miglani, Pranav Vatsal, and Raksha Sharma
  • RoBERTweet: A BERT Language Model for Romanian Tweets, Iulian-Marius Tăiatu, Andrei-Marius Avram, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, and Florin Pop
  • Decoding Strategies for Code Conciseness and Efficiency in Transformer-Generated Programs, Brendan Kondracki
  • SP-BERT: A Language Model for Political Text in Scandinavian Languages, Tu My Doan, Benjamin Kille, and Jon Atle Gulla
3.20pm Refreshments Break
3.50-5.10pm

Session 4 (Short Papers):  Information Extraction

  • A Few-shot Approach to Resume Information Extraction via Prompts, Chengguang Gan and Tatsunori Mori
  • Evaluating the Effect of Letter Case on Named Entity Recognition Performance, Tuan An Dao and Akiko Aizawa
  • Detecting Artificially Generated Academic Text: the Importance of Mimicking Human Utilization of Large Language Models, Vijini Liyanage and Davide Buscaldi
  • Novel Benchmark Data Set for Automatic Error Detection and Correction, Corina Masanti, Hans-Friedrich Witschel, and Kaspar Riesen

Session 5 (Short Papers): Social Media

  • Document Knowledge Transfer for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification Using a Left-Center-Right Separated Neural Network with Rotatory Attention, Emily Fields, Gonem Lau, Robbert Rog, Alexander Sternfeld, and Flavius Frasincar
  • Cross-Domain Toxic Spans Detection, Stefan F. Scuten,ho Baran Barbarestani, Wondimagegnhue Tufa, Piek Vossen, and Ilia Markov
  • Weakly-Supervised Multimodal Learning for Predicting the Gender of Twitter Users, Haruka Hirota, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn, and Kiyoaki Shirai

Day 2 - Thursday 22 June 2023 

Time Session
9am

Session 6 (Long Papers): Text Summarisation

  • Morphosyntactic Evaluation for Text Summarization in Morphologically Rich Languages: A Case Study for Turkish, Batuhan Baykara and Tunga Güngör

  • A Comparative Study of Evaluation Metrics for Long-Document Financial Narrative Summarization with Transformers, Nadhem Zmandar, Mahmoud El-Haj, and Paul Rayson

  • Node-Weighted Centrality Ranking for Unsupervised Long Document Summarization, Tuba Gokhan, Phillip Smith, and Mark Lee
10.30am Refreshments Break
11am

Session 7 (Long Papers): Knowledge Graphs 

  • Building Knowledge Graphs in Heliophysics and Astrophysics, Fech Scen Khoo, Megan Mark, Roelien C. Timmer, Marcella S. Ribeiro Martins, Emily Foshee, Kaylin Bugbee, Gregory Renard, and Anamaria Berea 
  • Expanding Domain-specific Knowledge Graphs with Unknown Facts, Miao Hu, Zhiwei Lin, and Adele Marshall
  • Knowledge Graph Representation Learning via Generated Descriptions, Miao Hu, Zhiwei Lin, and Adele Marshall
  • Explainable Integration of Knowledge Graphs using Large Language Models, Abdullah Fathi Ahmed, Asep Fajar Firmansyah, Mohamed Ahmed Sherif, Diego Moussallem, and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
1pm  Lunch Break
2pm

Session 8 (Long Papers): Nlp And Social Media

  • How Challenging is Multimodal Irony Detection?, Manuj Malik, David Tomás, and Paolo Rosso
  • Cross-domain and cross-language irony detection: The impact of bias on models’ generalization, Reynier Ortega-Bueno, Paolo Rosso, and Elisabetta Fersini
  • Adversarial Capsule Networks for Romanian Satire Detection and Sentiment Analysis, Sebastian-Vasile Echim, Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, Andrei-Marius Avram, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, and Florin Pop
3.30pm Refreshments Break
4pm - 5.30pm

Session 9 (Long Papers) Language Models And Models Evaluation

  • Evaluation of transformer-based models for punctuation and capitalization restoration in Spanish and Portuguese, Ronghao Pan, José Antonio García Díaz, and Rafael Valencia-Garcia
  • Could KeyWord Masking strategy improve language model? Mariya Borovikova, Arnaud Ferré, Robert Bossy, Mathieu Roche, and Claire Nédellec.
  • Regularization, Semi-supervision, and Supervision for a Plausible Attention-Based Explanation, Duc Hau Nguyen, Cyrielle Mallart, Guillaume Gravier, and Pascale Sébillot
7.30pm - 11pm Conference Gala Dinner. Museum Of Making, Derby Silk Mill, Silk Mill Lane, DE1 3AF

Day 3 - Friday 23 June 2023 

Time Session
9am

Session 10: Information Extraction And Retrieval

  • Effective Information Retrieval, Question Answering and Abstractive Summarization on Large-scale Biomedical Document Corpora, Naveen Shenoy, Pratham Nayak, Sarthak Jain, Sowmya Kamath S., and Vijayan Sugumaran
  • On the Rule-based Extraction of Statistics Reported in Scientific Papers, Tobias Kalmbach, Marcel Hoffman, Nicolas Lell, and Ansgar Scherp
  • GRAM: Grammar-Based Refined-Label Representing Mechanism in the Hierarchical Semantic Parsing Task, Dinh-Truong Do, Minh-Phuong Nguyen, and Le-Minh Nguyen
10.30am Refreshments Break
11am

Session 11 (Long Papers): Ner And Sentiment Classification

  • Less is more: A Prototypical Framework for Efficient Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition, Yue Zhang and Hui Fang
  • Sentence-to-Label Generation Framework for Multi-task Learning of Japanese Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition, Chengguang Gan, Qinghao Zhang, and Tatsunori Mori
  • IndQNER: Named Entity Recognition Benchmark Dataset from the Indonesian Translation of the Quran, Ria Hari Gusmita, Asep Fajar Firmansyah, Diego Moussallem, and Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
  • Explaining a Deep Learning Model for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification Using Post-hoc Local Classifiers, Vlad Miron, Flavius Frasincar and Maria Mihaela Truşcǎ
1pm Lunch Break
2pm

Session 12 (Long Papers): Industrial Applications 

  • Large Language Models in the Workplace: A Case Study on Prompt Engineering for Job Type Classification, Benjamin Clavié, Alexandru Ciceu, Frederick Naylor, Guillaume Soulié, and Thomas Brightwell
  • SmartEDU: Accelerating Slide Deck Production with Natural Language Processing, Maria João Costa, Hugo Amaro and Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira
  • Comparing object recognition models and studying hyperparameter selection for the detection of bolts, Tom Bolton, Julian Bass, Tarek Gaber, and Taha Mansouri
3.30pm Refreshments Break
4pm

Session 13 (Long Papers): Language Resources 

  • Characterisation of the City of the Future from a Science Fiction Corpus, Sami Guembour, Chuanming Dong, and Catherine Dominguès
  • A Review of Parallel Corpora for Automatic Text Simplification. Key Challenges Moving Forward, Tania Josephine Martin, José I. Abreu Salas, and Paloma Moreda Pozo
5pm - 5.30pm Best papers ceremony and concluding remarks

Conference information

By train 

Derby train station is located on the south side of the city. There are connecting bus services available as well as taxis available to accommodate you on further travel.

The University bus (U1) leaves from outside the main entrance of the train station and will take a stop outside Kedleston Road, Derby Campus. This bus leaves every hour and stops in the city centre on the way (easy connection to accommodation sites/additional travel links).

Alternatively, by using the Cab&Go services, you can book a taxi to collect you from the station. The booking needs to be made two hours in advance. 

Contact details for local transport companies: 

By bus 

The University bus U1 is available for all conference participants to use, its route includes stops by the main conference site as well as the city centre. Please note, the U1 will be running on a holiday service schedule during the dates of the conference. The service is cash only and begins its route from the train station. 

Derby bus station is located in the heart of Derby, it is a 35-minute walk away from the Kedleston Road campus. The U1 bus also goes to the Kedleston Road, Derby campus from outside here. 

If you need assistance organising your bus travel, please contact the Traveline information service: 0871 200 22 33 between 7am-10pm daily. 

Airport information 

East Midlands airport 

By Air - the closest airport is East Midlands, located just 15 miles from the Enterprise Centre. This should take around 25 minutes by car. Alternatively, Derby Skylink operates a 24-hour bus service, picking up directly outside the terminal building and dropping off at Derby Bus Station. This service runs every 30 minutes during the day and hourly during the night, seven days a week and takes approximately 40 minutes.

There is no need to book in advance for this service as bus tickets can be purchased from the bus driver or from the airport information desk.

Birmingham airport

Birmingham Airport is connected to Derby Train Station via Birmingham International Station and the free 'Air-Rail Link' system.  

The Air-Rail Link is free and operates between 5.00 and 02:00 daily, from within the airport terminal you would travel to Birmingham International Station where you would travel to Derby changing at Birmingham New Street. Trains depart regularly from Birmingham International Station to Derby, which takes approximately one hour.

Manchester airport

The fastest trains from Manchester Airport to Derby take around 1 hour and 52 minutes, covering a distance of around 74 kilometres. The journey between Manchester Airport and Derby usually involves one change of train.

We negotiated special conference deals with a range of local hotels in Derby, the full list can be found below:

The Leonardo Hotel (formerly Jury’s Inn)

Located on the north side of Derby’s city centre, The Leonardo Hotel is only 1.5 miles away from the Kedleston Road Campus and 2.1 miles away from the train station.

How to book: Contact the hotel via their official website and enter the term 'UoDEnterprise' in the promo code box.

Travel Lodge - Derby Cricket Ground

Located near the Derbyshire County Cricket Club, the Travel Lodge is only 2 miles away from Derby’s city centre. Discover more information about the Travel Lodge (Cricket Ground)

Rooms prices start at £34.99, the lowest in the local area.

University of Derby - Kedleston Road Campus

The Kedleston Road Campus is the largest University of Derby campus, located on the north side of Derby, 2.7 miles away from the train station and only 2 miles away from the bus station.

This campus is the conference's main location. How to find the Kedleston Road Campus

Silk Mill (Museum of Making)

We will be hosting the dinner on the second day of the conference at Derby's Museum of the Making, located right in the heart of Derby's City Centre, at what is widely regarded as the site of the world’s first modern factory at Derby Silk Mill, which is part of the Derwent Valley Mills UNESCO World Heritage site.

Conference fee

The cost to attend the 3 day conference is £375 VAT exempt, excluding accommodation.

Book your place

* Indicates a required field