REMU Kick-Off 2016

• Dates: Thursday 25th - Friday 26th August 2016
• Venue: Gottskär Hotell

Participants

1. Aarne Ranta
2. Gerardo Schneider
3. Koen Claessen
4. Prasanth Kolachina (V)
5. Inari Listenmaa (Ve)
6. John Camilleri
7. Thomas Hallgren
8. Peter Ljunglöf
9. David Bamutura

V = vegetarian, Ve = vegan

Program

• The main goal of the retreat is to come up with a workplan for the rest of the year (until the end of REMU).
• Participants don't need to prepare individual presentations (unless they want to).
• Everyone should contribute to putting together the workplan.

Thursday 25th August

• 08:30 Bus from Chalmers to venue. Pickup point: Kopparbunken, Elektrovägen 1.
• 09:15 "I [don't] know what you did last summer"
  • Information round
  • Plans for the upcoming year
• 10:00 Fika, of course
• 10:30 The flagship
  • Review of what we have
  • Workplan: what, when and who
  • Goals of retreat
• 12:00 Lunch & walk
• 14:00 Group work
• 15:30 Fika, obviously
• 17:00 Review of day 1
  • Promises for tomorrow
• 19:00 Dinner

Friday 26th August

• 09:00 Something fun
• 09:15 Group work
• 10:00 phew, it's fika
• 10:15 Group work
• 12:00 Lunch & walk
• 14:00 Promises delivered
• 15:00 last.fika.ever.
• 15:15 Conclusions
  • Set milestones and workplan
• 16:00 Bus back to Chalmers

Minutes

Thursday

What is the flagship?

• It is a method, technique, combination of technologies
• Shouldn't be a particular tool which we expect people to use
• But it will be software components that we as a group know how to put together
• And of course we will have some web demos

When

• roughly June 2017 is the end of REMU (most money would be finished by then)
• Flagship should be "delivered" before summer 2017

Try to build an "instance" of the flagship for a particular document, and then try to generalise later. We should have a repository of things we'd like to be able to do. Suggestions for possible domains/instances:

Other out of scope suggestions:

• GDPR General Data Protection Regulation http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32016R0679
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Medical treatments / Pharmaceutical database (FASS)

After voting, most popular are:

• course plans
• privacy policies
• terms of service

Course plans (CP)

What features would be wanted?

• Translation English/Swedish
• Format-checking (all parts are there)
• Dependency checking (entry requirements)
  • cyclic dependencies
  • mutually exclusive courses
  • it's possible to take a course and all its pre-reqs within a given amount of time (years)
• Regulations about how these plans are written. e.g., at GU the learning outcomes must be split into Skills, Judgements, .... Avoid certain verbs etc.

Privacy policies (PP)

• In a sense a lot of the work is already done because Raúl's logic with reasoning is already there
• Perhaps this would be a good place to start as it might be quick to build our first instance
• The value of multilingual versions is obvious (users of social networks)

Terms of service can be seen as an "extension" of the privacy policies.

Railway regulations (RR)

This will happen anyway (given grant is accepted). Translation is not so important here.

Conclusions

Perhaps we can start on all 3. We should have someone responsible for each (as a co-ordinator).

• PP, RR: Gerardo
• CP: Aarne PP and RR are relatively similar because both have a low-level formal language and the issue is mainly developing a CNL for it. CP: start with a fixed set of good examples. Build up grammar from that. There will be a lot new course plans available soon (October 2016)

Initial plans

• CP: start aligning a set of course plans, so that then a lexicon can be built and used as starting point for CNL
• PP: start from logic and start to think about verbalisations in CNL

Other stuff

• Grammar testing (Koen, Inari). This is independent of the domain/example.

Friday

Possible publications

VR doesn't monitor success but they will see publications (important for future proposals). There will probably need to make some final report for VR. Koen: We should aim for a flagship publication with all of us as authors.

Each of us discussed upcoming planned publications. Good to encourage new [internal] collaborations, e.g. alignment (Koen, Prasanth)

Note: NODALIDA 2017 will be in Gothenburg

Work Plan

3 work packages (bold indicates WP co-ordinator):

1. Course Plans (CP)

• Aarne, Koen, Prasanth, Gerardo, Peter
• Start with alignments of corpus. Koen and Prasanth have different methods and they will compare and combine them.
• Get an idea of what kind of DB we can build from the CPs and the kind of queries we can run.
• Try to come up with a CNL which can describe CPs and enable translation.
• Then set up meeting with Åsa and program responsibles, when we have something to show.

2. Privacy Policies (PP)

• Gerardo, John, Aarne
• Start with a low-level CNL which represents semantics. Start with BNF, then import into GF, and add some syntactic sugar functions to make things more natural.
• Who will use? Users of a social network (Diaspora example)

3. Grammar testing (GT)

• Koen, Inari

Timing

• Soft deadline for flagship is June 2017.
• We should have regular delivery dates, every 4 weeks, staggered for the different WPs.
• A delivery is not defined by functionality but to ensure that we deliver something regularly. Thus each WP should have a checklist of things and a delivery should ideally check off something from the list. Co-ordinator should manage this list. The delivery itself should be a commit in the repository but also a demo at the REMU meeting.

Longer absences in upcoming year (2016/17):

• John: parental leave in SP3, and some percentage of SP4
• Koen: away for 3 months in 2017 (partially over summer)
• Gerardo: long holiday at the end of 2016
• Peter: completely busy with teaching in SP4
• Inari: possible research visit in the spring
• Prasanth: teaching in SP2, SP4
• Aarne: teaching in SP3, SP4

Editing this page

1. git pull
2. Edit www/retreat/2016/index.md
3. Run make in above directory
4. Commit and push both index.md and index.html