On the 8th-10th September 2022, 51st Poznan Linguistic Meeting

On 8th-10th of September 2022. 51st Poznań Linguistic Meeting, PLM 2022, took place at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, on the theme, “What can linguistics contribute to AI in translation”. Over 60 papers, about a dozen of PhD posters, three Plenaries. A Keynote talk and a closing Grand Debate were in the programme. The Oganisers and active personal participation of the Vice Rector, Professor Katarzyna Dziubałska-Kolaczyk made the event really rich in exchanges and memorable. The Plenary by Krzysztof Jassem, Can we defeat Google translate, 9th September, and the Grand Debate, 10th September, were especially interesting and attracted a massive audience. Dr Jassem noted domain adaptation, document-level translation rather than translation sentence after sentence, back translation, extraction and verification of lexicon and name entity recognition as steps and processes which can be implemented to improve Google translation. He also mentioned that rule-based approach requires human effort while reference translation can improve the quality and while the system can be taught to assess itself. The closing Grand Debate emphasized the efforts IT professionals, linguists working in the field and practitioners in contributing to the improvement of the work of AI which, it was, at present promises unbelievable progress. The 51st Poznań Linguistic Meeting confirmed the interest and research results of the participants in contributing to the development of AI resources and its products in translation. Individual papers, such as Salience of Greater Poland Polish, by Kamil Kaźmierski and Karolina Baranowska, Acoustic and perceptual similarity of L2 English and L3 Norwegian vowels to L1 Polish categories, by Anna Balas and J Weckwerth, The role of TIME and CONDITION in syntactical CLI: a report on longitudinal study, by Sywiusz Žychliński et al, local concepts of well-being and cultural revitalization: The case of Wilamowice, by Justyna Majerska-Sznajder, Can linguistic insights on semantic similarity help its automatic treatment, by Maja Miličevič Petrovič, Radoslava Trnavac and Borko Kovačevič, Involving linguists in developing AI for language learning, by Kacper Lodzikowski, and other presentations might be metioned as highlights. M Liudvika Drazdauskiene presented on the topic, Language analysis required to improve AI resources, which also focused on the limitations of Google translate and so was in line with the Plenary of Dr Jassem and other papers at this Conference.

 

Poznań Linguistic Meetings continue a great tradition at the Adam Mickiewicz University to invite linguists to share their knowledge and discoveries in recent and developing fields every year. This University is a place to compare individual results with those of the community of international scholars and assess one‘s own results for more productive further work. Gratefully acknowledging the attention and work of Professor Katarzyna Dziubałska Kolaczyk and other members of the Organising Committee, it can be said that this Linguistic Meeting can definitly be of interest to all European linguists as a place of scholarship and up-to-date knowledge, which encourages collective and individual interests and contributions.