Two University researchers mentor young computer scientists at Google Summer of Code
The international network of research network Hen Lab, to which Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagán belong, was one of the institutions participating in this global program.
Inés Olza and Cristóbal Pagán, researchers from the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, have participated this summer in the Google Summer of Code. They were present as members of the international consortium network Hen Lab for the Study of Multimodal Communication, which brings together experts from more than 15 universities from different countries such as USA, Spain, Germany, Brazil or Norway.
Specifically, Olza and Pagán, of the project 'Public discourse' of the ICS, helped supervise Russian developer Ekaterina Ageeva's project , aimed at automatically detecting and labeling multiverbal linguistic expressions. In addition to her, four other young people collaborated with network Hen Lab on projects that also link digital Humanities , computational linguistics and development of open access tools.
Google Summer of Code is a global program that awards grants to young computer scientists from around the world to collaborate with institutions, groups at research and companies dedicated to developing code for open source tools . The mentoring institutions selected by Google Summer of Code present several projects from work that young computer scientists can join.
Newscape, the great Library Services of television news.The network Hen Lab projects consisted of developing automatic text (natural language processing), sound and image processing tools that could be incorporated into its Library Services International TV NewsScape.
This database is a gigantic corpus of spoken language, which makes it possible to study all multimodal aspects (gesture, prosody, images and sounds accompanying speech, television production effects, etc.). It is therefore an unprecedented tool that could revolutionize the study of speech and news coverage.
It currently contains more than 250,000 hours of television news in English, Spanish and other European languages that can be searched automatically. NewsScape allows, for example, to compare the treatment of a topic on different channels and programs by searching for words core topic in their subtitles.
With respect to the Spanish news collection, it currently constitutes the largest existing resource for the study of spoken Spanish, with some 6,000 hours of television and some 40 million synchronized subtitles.