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A hospital is not the most cosy place for children to be in. Visual artist Ludivine Lechat and computer linguist Tom De Smedt developed Story Table, which aims to create interactive fairytales for hospitalized children to reduce stress and loneliness.

“Multilingualism was a burden”, muslim master student and opinion maker Yasmien Naciri testified. She constantly felt trapped on a bridge trying to connect different worlds. In high school she preferred reading over writing, because in reading there was no interaction needed. But then she took part in a poetry contest and discovered the joy of writing.

The way you write reveals a lot about who you are. Your age, your gender and even your personality are encoded in your personal writing style. With Textgain, Guy De Pauw developed a technology that automatically extracts demographic features from your writing, using powerful machine learning techniques.

People fear public speaking more than death, according to Jordi Casteleyn ánd a lot of scientific surveys 😉 It is a fact that many presenters experience public speaking stress, which has a direct impact on the quality of their talk. Why not battle it with improvisational theatre?

Often people do not know how to begin searching for information. You try any combination of keywords but just can’t find what you are looking for. Or what if you have a huge pile of counsel reports, press articles, advisory reports… and you have to look through them in a short period of time to find the information you need?

At a certain point in time, every writing researcher needs to assess the quality of writing. But doing this in a reliable and valid way is often a challenge. Maarten Goossens and Renske Bouwer presented D-PAC, a challenging new tool to assess competencies such as writing.

Can machines write their own books? Writing literature has always been a human skill. But now there’s AsiBot, the literary robot of the University of Antwerp and het Meertens Instituut. AsiBot is able to write synthetic literature. It has written a story with the Dutch best-selling author Ronald Giphart.

On the evening before the official start of the conference, we hope to inspire you with Ignite-style short presentations on the exciting topic of “Language and creativity”. Various speakers will share their passion in 5-minute presentations. The SIGnite sessions are a wonderful occasion to start off the conference in a relaxing way and to meet your colleagues in an informal setting @ Cuperus Coffee.