Industry Pitch Talks Recap

On October 7th, we hosted another session in our “Pitchtalks with Industry” series — this time in collaboration with Munich NLP. The event brought together more than 50 members of Munich’s NLP community.

This edition featured:

• Verena Blaschke (MCML PhD student in the group of our PI Barbara Plank), who walked us through the chaos of processing German dialects — from inconsistent spellings and data scarcity to tokenizers that break when faced with dialect words. Turns out, dialect NLP is way fuzzier and more complex than you might expect!
• Evgeniya Sukhodolskaya from Qdrant introduced miniCOIL — an approach to make search understand meaning, not just match keywords. Think BM25, but with semantic understanding.

Thanks to everyone who joined and contributed to the discussions — and to our partners at Munich NLP for helping make this event such a success!