On June 24, 2022, ITFLOWS Consortium partners organised and participated in the first workshop on “Natural Language Processing for Political Sciences,” as part of the European Language Resources Association’s 13th Edition of its Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022) in Marseille, France. Haithem Afli of Munster Technological University (Ireland) led this initiative, joined by Mehwish Alam of the FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and Cristina Blasi and Colleen Boland of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
LREC is a major event for researchers, industries and funding agencies to explore language resources (LRs) and evaluation for language technologies (LT). The conference sought to explore emerging trends and new R&D directions, as well as serve as a knowledge exchange on LRs and their applications, evaluation methodologies and tools. It tackled ongoing and future activities, private and industrial sector implementation and needs, and general e-society requirements, with respect to policy, technological and organisational issues. Dr. Afli opened the workshop, explaining that collaboration between researchers from both computer and political sciences, in order to improve mutual understanding in our societies, served as an overarching aim in the workshop. ITFLOWS Coordinator Dr. Blasi then provided the keynote speech, “The Role of Emerging Predictive IT Tools in Effective Migration Governance,” particularly with reference to the ITFLOWS project. Following the first session, Dr. Alam chaired the workshops poster session, and Dr. Afli provided closing remarks after the second session.

