Last May I participated in the 10th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference in Portorož (Slovenia). 
LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Language Technologies (LT). The aim of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art, explore new R&D directions and emerging trends, exchange information regarding LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools, ongoing and planned activities, industrial uses and needs, requirements coming from the e-society, both with respect to policy issues and to technological and organisational ones.

In this conference I presented a paper entitled "A Semi-Supervised Approach for Gender Identification" which I wrote with Leo Wanner. I gave a talk where I explaned how Semi-Supervised learning is a very useful machine learning technique in cases where training data is scarce. I presented the experiments that we performed, applying our algorithm (which is a semi-supervised version of K-nearest neighbors) on gender identification (classification of texts based on the gender of the authors) and was very pleased to receive great feedback from researchers from this field and from other similar ones. 

I am thankful to the DTIC for funding this trip and letting me present my work in front of other researchers of the world of NLP.

Link to the conference:  http://lrec2016.lrec-conf.org/en/
Link to the paper: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2016/pdf/370_Paper.pdf