Slovak NLP Community Meeting #1

11:00 Intro: welcome and objectives
11:15 Research team presentations: Part I
12:00 Computational infrastructure for NLP [Lucia Demovičová / Michal Pitoňák, NSCC]
12:30 Lunch
13:15 Invited talk: Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization in Multilingual LLMs [Qiwei Peng, University of Copenhagen]
14:15 Research team presentations: Part II
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Roundtable: synergies and collaborations (open discussion, informal ending)
16:30+ Wrap-up and closing

Unless stated otherwise, sessions are moderated by KInIT.

The first meeting took place on September 16, 2024, in the event space of the Spot coworking center in Bratislava, under the auspices of KInIT. Representatives of 10 research teams from across Slovakia participated. The program of the meeting focused on introductions and getting to know each other. It also included a presentation of computational infrastructure by NSCC. During the open roundtable discussion, community members discussed the need for a formal statement on the importance of language technology research for Slovakia, which resulted in its publication a few days after the meeting. The community agreed on key open challenges: the lack of data, models, and benchmarks for the Slovak language. A working group on benchmarking was established, alongside a parallel effort to further train a Slovak Mistral model. The program was enriched by an invited talk from Qiwei Peng (University of Copenhagen), who was at the time on a research exchange stay at KInIT.