The Journey of our Virtual NLP Workshop
Text Summarization & Explainability with Reuters News Data
Our applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) workshop will help you get started with state-of-the-art text summarization and it will introduce you to the importance of human-AI interaction.
Then, you will get a glimpse of the strengths and limitations of Transfer Learning. And finally, you will generate your own news headlines and implement one explainability approach to strengthen the trust a user has in the AI-generated headline.
We are currently looking at ways to scale this workshop and make it available to a wider audience, so if this is interesting to you, keep an eye open for updates! ;)
The Virtual Aspect
Soon it will be a full year since our workshop was just a bunch of sticky notes on a window.
With the onset of Covid shutdowns, like everyone else, we suddenly had to recreate this in-person workshop for a virtual environment. One thing that these sticky notes were missing was a well-rounded VIRTUAL format.
We haven’t been to virtual conferences, meetups and lectures before. We did not know what the best format for our virtual audience would be — where to put breaks, how many Q&A sessions and so on.
The first time we held our workshop was in 2020 at the Open Data Science Conference West (ODSC). All of it was prerecorded. We communicated with the participants and answered only via chat.
The prerecording indeed kept us on time, but we really missed the personal connection to our participants. We also wanted to be sure that before moving to Text Summarization everyone was ready to get cracking. Therefore, we started adding live sections. We had to find a balance between keeping to the time limit via a prerecording and more personal interactions via a live Q&A.
One thing that thankfully none of the participants at ODSC was affected by was that my internet connection was constantly dropping.
It has happened to me that in the middle of a presentation in front of 100+ TR colleagues there would be a power blackout, and I could not get back on for 5 minutes. And then another 5 minutes to get back to the meeting and share my slides. Imagine this happening during the workshop … externally.
I remember being so anxious before NLP Zurich. Therefore, I asked Nadja and Andreea that we check who has the fastest and most reliable internet connection. And that’s not all …
Around midnight I actually dropped off one of my Ethernet cableS (yes, I do have multiple) at Nadja’s mailbox!
My internet connection struggles aside, it has been so interesting to see how different people would use and react to the different formats we tried.
I am so grateful to all the constructive feedback participants gave us!
Key Lessons
- Using a prerecording helps avoid technical glitches such as your internet connection dropping in the middle of it.
- Have live questions after each big section of your workshop instead of one big Q&A block at the end enables people to ask more questions.
- Listen to the feedback to adjust Hands-On exercises length.
Reflections
In the image below I wanted to illustrate how the workshop’s format has changed after every event. We appreciate all the feedback, learnings and audience that helped us get to a better VIRTUAL workshop!
To everyone who took part in the workshop at some of those events:
Well done! :)
What’s Next
We are actively working together with my teammates and internal stakeholders to see how we can scale this workshop for wider audiences.
So, stay tuned. There’s more to come!
