STIL Master Thesis Prize

STIL (Stichting Toepassing Inductieve Leertechnieken) is an association with as its goal the stimulation of research on the applications of machine learning techniques. Between 2009 -- 2017, STIL sponsored a prize for an MA thesis that describes high quality research in computational linguistics or its applications.

This prize of 1000 euro was awarded for the first time during CLIN 2009 in Utrecht, and from that time on a yearly basis during the CLIN meetings until 2017.

MA theses submitted to and evaluated at a university or organization of higher education in The Netherlands or Flanders are eligible for the prize. The thesis should address a topic in computational linguistics or its applications, and may be written in Dutch or English.

The candidates were evaluated by a jury presided by the organizer of CLIN that year, and consisted further of the organizers of the two preceding CLIN meetings. The jury decides in consensus to which candidate the prize is awarded. The jury can also decide not to award a prize or to award the prize to a maximum of two candidates. In the latter case, the money prize will be shared.

Laureates

• STIL Prize 2017 (Nijmegen, January 26, 2018): Merijn Beeksma (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) Computer, how long have I got left? Predicting life expectancy with a long short-term memory to aid in early identification of the palliative phase (jury: Iris Hendrickx (chair), Vincent Vandeghinste, and Piek Vossen).
• STIL Prize 2016: not awarded.
• STIL Prize 2015 (Amsterdam, December 18, 2015): Nikos Voskarides (MSc obtianed at University of Amsterdam), Explaining relationships between entities (jury: Piek Vossen, Walter Daelemans, Frank Landsbergen)
• STIL Prize 2014 (Antwerp, February 6, 2015; jury: Guy de Pauw, Frank Landsbergen, Anton Nijholt)
  • Hannah Tops (MSc obtained at Utrecht University), The predictive power of tweets: An exploratory study
  • Chris Emmery (MA obtained at Tilburg University), Topic modeling in online discussions: Analysis of the developments within the Dutch privacy debate on news websites
• STIL Prize 2013 (Leiden, 2014): Greet Olaerts (MA obtained at University of Leuven), My text meets Wikipedia, January 17, 2014. (Jury: Frank Landsbergen, Anton Nijholt, Menno van Zaanen).
• STIL Prize 2012 (Enschede, 2013): Phong Le (MA obtained at University of Amsterdam), Learning Semantic Parsing, January 18, 2013. (Jury: Anton Nijholt, Menno van Zaanen, Véronique Hoste).
• In 2011, the STIL prize has not been awarded.
• STIL prize 2010 (Gent, 2011): Margaux Smets (MA obtained at University of Amsterdam), A U-DOP approach to modeling language acquisition, February 11, 2010. (Jury: Véronique Hoste, Eline Westerhout, Erik Tjong Kim Sang).
• STIL prize 2009 (Utrecht, 2010): Maarten van Gompel for his thesis Phrase-based memory-based machine translation. (Jury: Paola Monachesi, Erik Tjong Kim Sang, Suzan Verberne).