Category: Achievements

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TRIFECTA Team Takes Home Two Awards @LDK

Gauri accepting the Best Student Paper Award from conference chair Andon Tchechmedjiev

In September, team members Gauri, Jiaqi, Marieke, Rik, and Teresa travelled to Naples, Italy to attend and present at LDK 2025, the 5th Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge. This conference is very central to the different research strands in the project, so it was great to (re)connect with colleagues and see what they are working on (and eat great food).

We presented the following papers:

  • Veruska Zamborlini, Jiaqi Zhu, Marieke van Erp, and Arianna Betti. Philosophising Lexical Meaning as an OntoLex-Lemon Extension. (presented at the satellite OntoLex workshop). This research is part of our knowledge modelling strand and in this paper we investigated how we can represent different aspects and meanings of a concept through time or in different contexts;
  • Gauri Bhagwat, Marieke van Erp, Teresa Paccosi, Rik Hoekstra. Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes. This research is part of our food history use case, and presents an analysis of different editions of a cookbook as well as newspaper recipes to see how ingredient use changes over time;
  • Marieke van Erp, Jiaqi Zhu, Vera Provatorova. Tracing Organisation Evolution in Wikidata. This paper is an investigation of how change is represented in one of the largest and most commonly used knowledge graphs. As we are considering feeding any data generated within the project back into this, it is necessary to know if existing data models are a suitable fit;
  • Andrea Schimmenti, Stefano De Giorgis, Fabio Vitali, Marieke van Erp. Old Reviews, New Aspects: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis and Entity Typing for Book Reviews with LLMs. In this collaboration with the University of Bologna and the Italian National Research Council, we investigated the use of large language models to analyse opinions in a data-scarce domain. Whilst we used a different use case domain than TRIFECTA’s main maritime and food history use cases, we think it is important to see what connections to other domains we have and how tools work there to see if we can translate them to our use cases.

While it’s already great to get papers accepted to a conference and present and discuss them with colleagues, it was even cooler to see our efforts recognised by the fact that Detecting Changing Culinary Trends Through Historical Recipes coordinated by Gauri won the Best Student Paper Award and our Tracing Organisation Evaluation in Wikidata paper won the Best Poster Award!

The winning poster
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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.