[NLPL Task Force (A)] Fwd: [NLPL Board] NLP in Tartu, Estonia

[Stephan Oepen]

just fyi.

i believe the infrastructure task force now has the authority to accept
associate partners.

and regarding mark, i think we have previously decided to welcome his
association, so i will just go ahead and ask him to request accounts.

like with robert, i will encourage them to put load on Abel first.  once
the request an allocation on Taito, i imagine we can deal with that
separately :-).

best wishes, oe

ps: i am eager to get mark associated, in part because i suspect it
strengthens our case in asking NeIC for continued support.


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Mark Fishel <fishel at ut.ee>
Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2018 at 06:44
Subject: Re: [NLPL Board] NLP in Tartu, Estonia
To: Stephan Oepen <oe at ifi.uio.no>


Stephan,

I forgot to include some further details, described on the NLPL website.

1. expected types of computing
Training and evaluating neural models for translation, text-to-speech.

2. software
We use and write open source software. More specifically,
- for NMT we use SockEye from AWSLabs, which uses mxnet as the low-level
backend
- for TTS and for all custom models we use either PyTorch or Tensorflow
- our own software is at https://github.com/TartuNLP

3. data
This includes several different datasets. For machine translation we use
OPUS's corpora a lot (Europarl, OpenSubtitles, others). Our group has
annotated and developed a large number of Estonian corpora, a lot of which
can be accessed through https://metashare.ut.ee/, maintained by the Center
of Estonian Language Resources.

4. anticipated group of users
The affiliation for all the users from our side will be the NLP research
group, institute of computer science, University of Tartu. The number of
active users at the moment would be 8 people, which is bound to grow in th
enear future, and of course we can scale this down if needed.

Best wishes,
Mark


On Sun, Oct 21, 2018 at 7:32 AM Mark Fishel <fishel at ut.ee> wrote:

> Dear Stephan, everyone,
>
> we are definitely interested! Sorry for the huge delay in my answer.
>
> Our primary need is computational power, mainly servers with GPUs. We have
> an HPC at our university, but its GPU capacity is only enough for
> small-scale experiments and several groups use it besides us.
>
> The experiments where we would need this computational power is currently
> neural machine translation and end-to-end speech synthesis, I am hoping to
> expand it in the near future to dependency parsing and other topics.
>
> In addition to the computational resources another big appeal to me is the
> possibility of more easily exchanging data, experimental setup and results
> with partners from the NLPL network, we will gladly expand the
> collaboration with colleagues from Helsinki University and Uppsala, and of
> course will happily start new collaborations with other partners.
>
> Please let me know if anything else is needed from my side, I promise no
> more delays :-)
>
> Best wishes,
> Mark
>
> On Tue, Oct 9, 2018 at 12:10 PM Stephan Oepen <oe at ifi.uio.no> wrote:
>
>> hi again, mark,
>>
>> re-sending the message below, to make sure it actually made it to you?  i
>> took it as all but a certainty that you were interested in joining the NLPL
>> associate programme, but to initiate that process it would be good to have
>> a brief summary of your needs, according to the guidelines for associate
>> partners on the NLPL web site.
>>
>> best wishes, oe
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>> From: Stephan Oepen <oe at ifi.uio.no>
>> Date: Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 5:36 PM
>> Subject: Re: [NLPL Board] NLP in Tartu, Estonia
>> To: Mark Fishel <fishel at ut.ee>
>> Cc: Bjørn Lindi <bjorn.lindi at ntnu.no>, contact at nlpl.eu <contact at nlpl.eu>
>>
>>
>> hi again, mark,
>>
>> as of this summer, NLPL has created an associate programme, to give
>> additional compute-intensive NLP research groups in northern europe a
>> way of taking advantage of our software and data installations.  the
>> notion of associate partners was minted in response to your original
>> query in april, so i hope you might still be interested?  if so,
>> please see the instructions on the NLPL front page
>> (‘http://www.nlpl.eu’) and send us an email about your anticipated
>> needs.
>>
>> best wishes, oe
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 13, 2018 at 8:50 AM, Mark Fishel <fishel at ut.ee> wrote:
>> > Dear Bjørn,
>> >
>> > thank you for the info! I will see about the Taito system, and if there
>> are
>> > any updates on outside groups joining, I would be happy to find out!
>> >
>> > Best wishes,
>> > Mark
>> >
>> >
>> > On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 9:53 AM Bjørn Lindi <bjorn.lindi at ntnu.no>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Dear Mark,
>> >> the NLPL have just started a discussion on how to open our resources to
>> >> research groups outside NLPL. This is something we will work on in the
>> >> coming months, though one way to get an immediate start is to get an
>> >> personal account on the Finnish system taito. A personal account comes
>> with
>> >> a low compute quota  (I think it is around 10 000 CPU hours), but you
>> will
>> >> be able to browse NLPL resources and see what we currently provide.
>> >>
>> >> Be sides this practical step, we will be able to take you into account
>> as
>> >> we investigate how our resources could be shared to a greater benefit.
>> >>
>> >> Thanks for reaching out. I am sure we will find a way to collaborate.
>> >>
>> >> Yours Sincerely
>> >> Bjørn Lindi
>> >> NLPL Project Manager
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> On 10 Apr 2018, at 19:03, Mark Fishel <fishel at ut.ee> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Dear NLPL people,
>> >>
>> >> Estonia is currently looking for ways of closer ties with NEIC, and I
>> was
>> >> wondering if it is possible for the NLP group in Tartu to collaborate
>> with
>> >> NLPL, and what could the conditions for that be?
>> >>
>> >> The NLP group in Tartu (https://nlp.cs.ut.ee/) is working on data
>> science
>> >> applied to NLP, as well as linguistic resources like UD and other
>> corpora.
>> >> In particular this year we are organizing two sub-tracks in the
>> translation
>> >> shared task of WMT (unsupervised and multilingual NMT) and have
>> participated
>> >> in the tasks on translation, metrics and quality estimation.
>> >>
>> >> As far as infrastructure goes, we have a high performance computing
>> center
>> >> (http://hpc.ut.ee), but could use much more than what we currently
>> have.
>> >>
>> >> So, I would love to talk to someone in NLPL and talk about
>> possibilities /
>> >> requirements / etc.
>> >>
>> >> Best wishes,
>> >> Mark
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>>
>
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