Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson

Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson

NLP Researcher

Miðeind ehf

University of Iceland

Biography

Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson is a researcher in Natural Language Processing. In the last couple of years his work has focused on question answering, neural machine translation and language modeling with down stream tasks. Currently he is interested in natural language underesting, investigating the logical and causal reasoning capabilities of language models as well as multi modal settings. He works at Miðeind ehf, an Icelandic language technology startup focusing on keeping Icelandic relevant as natural language is increasingly used to interface our devices. He is also a member of the Natural Language processing lab at the University of Iceland.

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Interests
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Reasoning capabilities of language models
Education

  • MSc in Computer Science, 2021

    University of Iceland

  • BA in Philosophy, 2012

    University of Iceland

  • BSc in Mathematics, 2011

    University of Iceland

Recent Publications

A Warm Start and a Clean Crawled Corpus - A Recipe for Good Language Models
We train several language models for Icelandic, including IceBERT, that achieve state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream …
Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Haukur Barri Símonarson, Pétur Orri Ragnarsson, Svanhvít Ingólfsdóttir, Haukur Páll Jónsson, Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson, Hafsteinn Einarsson
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Natural Questions in Icelandic
We present the first extractive question answering (QA) dataset for Icelandic, Natural Questions in Icelandic (NQiI). Developing such …
Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Hafsteinn Einarsson
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Miðeind's WMT 2021 submission
We present Miðeinds submission for the English→Icelandic and Icelandic→English subsets of the 2021 WMT news translation task. …
Haukur Barri Símonarson, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Pétur Orri Ragnarsson, Haukur Páll Jónsson, Vilhjálmur Þorsteinsson
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Automated methods for Question-Answering in Icelandic
Question Answering (QA) is the automated task of providing an answer to a question posed in human language. Whether through search …
Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson
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Recent Projects

Open QA for Icelandic and English
Question Answering for Icelandic using language models, machine translated datasets and pre-embedded phrases.
PDF
Open QA for Icelandic and English
Machine Translation between Icelandic and English
A translation system built as part of the Icelandic Language Technology Programme.
velthyding.is
Machine Translation between Icelandic and English
IceBERT
IceBERT is the first large neural language model for Icelandic.
PDF Code
IceBERT

Recent & Upcoming Talks

Artificial Intelligence and Question Answering
An introduction on Question Answering using neural networks, based on the
Nov 11, 2021 11:30 AM — 12:30 PM Icelandic Engineering Society
Artificial Intelligence and Question Answering
Language and Artificial Intelligence
A chat about language and artifical inteligence with a focus on language models.
Sep 23, 2021 5:15 PM — 6:00 PM Reykjavik City Library
Link
Language and Artificial Intelligence
Machine translation, an important option (IS)
Introduction to machine translation at a conference on Icelandic language technology.
May 18, 2021 8:45 AM — 1:00 PM Reykjavík University
Video
Machine translation, an important option (IS)

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