Author: gbhagwat

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Conferences

LREC 2026

From 11 May to 16 May 2026, Gauri Bhagwat and Teresa Paccosi were in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, attending LREC 2026. During the entire week, we attended keynote sessions, prize talk, workshops, poster presentations, and engaging discussions with fellow researchers and experts from both academia and industry. Truly, it was an enriching experience that was full of new ideas.

Kicking Off with Workshops

The first two days and the last day of the conference were dedicated for workshop, providing an excellent opportunity to meet professionals working with language resources and computational linguistics. For the ‘Fourth Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA 2026)’, Teresa Paccosi had a poster presentation for the paper “Smelling the Past: Investigating Historical Models for Olfactory Event Extraction“, co-authored with Marijn Koolen.

Sharing Our Research

The main conference took place from 13 May to 15 May, and we were excited to present our own work on the very first day. During the main conference poster session, we presented our paper, “To Eat and Beyond: A FrameNet-Inspired Annotation of Food and Its Uses over Time“. To make the session a little more memorable, we had personalised tea bags as goodies for everyone, and they turned out to be a huge hit and a fantastic conversation starter! From curious glances to discussions with the fellow researchers who shared our interest in semantic annotation, historical language, and food-related research, we truly enjoyed presenting our work.

Highlights

The conference was a wonderful combination of excellent keynote talks, technical sessions, and the renowned Antonio Zampolli Prize Talk. One of the biggest highlight for us was to listen to Dan Jurafsky as he delivered his keynote. Over the past several months, we have been reading and discussing the book written by him and James H. Martin within our NLP book club, and it has been amazing to hear him talk personally about the present status and future perspectives of NLP.

Another memorable evening was the conference gala dinner at Pueblo Español, an open-air architectural museum showcasing Spanish architectural heritage. Local cuisine and live music with traditional dance performances added the final touch to a relaxing evening after 3 intense conference days and 2 workshop days.

Wrapping Up

From day one in Palma, we formed a new routine: attending presentations on exciting research, followed by a refreshing swim in the Mediterranean Sea. It was the perfect balance of learning, networking, and enjoying the beautiful surroundings. By the end of the week, we were leaving with new collaborations taking shape, many new professional connections, a healthy Mediterranean tan, and minds full of ideas that we are eager to bring back to our own research.

A heartfelt thank you to the organisers, speakers, and everyone we had the pleasure of meeting for making LREC 2026 such a rewarding and memorable experience.

Until next time…

Categories
Achievements

We won HackaLOD!

On the night between the 8th and 9th of November, Trifecta team members, Gauri Bhagwat and Teresa Paccosi and Marieke van Erp, along with Andrea Schimmenti (UNIBO & DHLab guest), Bruno Sartini (LMU), and Richard Zijdeman (IISH) formed the MAMBO team [Munich, AMsterdam, BOlogna]. Together we won the jury award at HackaLOD 2024!

The Olympic stadium was the extraordinary frame in which we worked, spending the night coding, sharing ideas, and collaborating on innovative solutions to represent what lies behind and beyond the Olympic athletes, all while immersed in the stimulating atmosphere of the entire event.

Our journey began Friday at 5 p.m. with a kickoff event that introduced all 11 teams and provided a brief overview of the jury and program. The jury, a diverse panel of accomplished professionals, brought together expertise from multiple fields, setting high expectations for each team. Erwin Folmer, experienced researcher and team leader in ICT, chaired the jury, joined by Claudia van Oppen, an advocate for Open Science and director of Maastricht University Library; sports heritage expert Jurryt van de Vooren; Robert Sanderson from Yale University’s Digital Cultural Heritage department; and Geert-Jan Bogaerts, chairman of the PublicSpaces Foundation.

After dinner, each team dived into their projects, and the stadium quickly filled with the buzz of ideas, caffeine, and excitement. Fueled by coffee, fries, peanut M&Ms, and all the sugar we could find, we immersed ourselves in the challenge ahead, ready to materialize the idea in next 18 hours.

Beyond the amazing experience, we were impressed by how each of us contributed with our unique skills, combining different methodologies such as entity linking, entity recognition, NLP-based analysis, and quantitative visualization to work with both structured and unstructured data.

The synergy and connection we shared was even more surprising considering that half of the team had only met in person the night of the hackathon! The combination of skills, team-oriented attitudes, and passion for data made for a night filled with hard work but, above all, great fun!

The late hours brought not only focused work but also unexpected fun! Some of us couldn’t resist taking a break to jog a few laps around the iconic Olympic track, connecting with the very place where so many sporting legends had left their mark. By the early morning, with the jury visiting at 11 a.m., our adrenaline and anticipation were high. When presentations began at 1 p.m., every team showcased their hard work and unique insights. The day ended with a panel discussion, sharing reflections on the future of data in sports history, and then finally, the moment we had all been waiting for: the jury award announcement.

“And the winner is… TEAM MAMBO!”

We did it! After a night fueled by collaboration, creativity, and camaraderie, it was a rewarding end to an unforgettable hackathon experience. We’re already looking forward to the next one, ready for another round of caffeine, creativity, and pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve together.