From 8 to 13 December, UPF is hosting the 28^th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING2020), one of the most important expert meetings in the world. Throughout the week, this time online, researchers will be sharing their knowledge in areas such as reading comprehension and spoken language understanding, information extraction and knowledge graphs, analysis of sentiment and emotion, language generation and machine learning methods.

Several UPF members are to take part in the conference. They are notably Núria Bel, full professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, who is responsible for the conference programme, and Horacio Saggion, Leo Wanner and Mònica Domínguez, researchers with the Department of Information and Communication Technologies, as local conference organizers.

The conference will kick off on 8 December with the opening session, which will include the participation of Joan Gómez Pallarès, director general for Research of the Catalan Ministry of Business and Knowledge; Júlia Miralles de Imperial, Science and Universities delegate of Barcelona City Council who is responsible for the Department of Education, Science and Community, and Enric Vallduví, UPF vice-rector for research projects.

The conference hinges around research presentations, workshops and tutorials. There will also be presentations by leading figures in the field of computational linguistics like Amanda Stent, text and discourse processing analyst at Bloomberg LP; Harald Baayen, professor of Quantitative Linguistics at the University of Tubingen; Margaret Mitchell, senior researcher of the Google Research and Machine Intelligence group; Monica Lam, professor of Computer Science at the University of Stanford, and Tal Linzen, professor of Linguistics and Data Science at New York University.

The conference is supported by institutions such as Lenovo, SAP, Baidu, Bloomberg, Zalando, Airc, Amazon, expert.ai and grammarly.