Workshop proceedings now availableHumanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence

20 December 2022

Photo: Gwen Melzer

From 19-23 September 2022, the 45th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held in Trier. For the second time, the programme included a workshop on 'Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence' (CHAI), the proceedings of which are now available online.

The way knowledge is generated, processed, and made accessible is now inextricably linked to the use of artificial intelligence. Today, the new technologies are also having an increasing impact on the humanities. However, the interaction between the humanities and the computer sciences is still comparatively undeveloped. To date, there are few interaction spaces where members of the respective disciplines can exchange ideas, understand each other’s questions and methods, and jointly explore the potential for collaboration.

The workshop ‘Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence’ (CHAI) attempts to close this gap. Organised by Sylvia Melzer and Stefan Thiemann, who both belong to the Research Field ‘Data Linking’ at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Understanding Written Artefacts’, and Hagen Peukert, researchers interested in deepening this exchange came together for the second time. Five papers were presented during the workshop, which was part of the 45th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence in September 2022 in Trier. These presentations covered a wide range of topics, including for example how Computational Pattern Analysis can advance the study of Tibetan initiation cards, how Natural Language Processing contributes to the understanding of Buddhological Epigraphy, and how a robot named Pepper assists humanities researchers in information retrieval processes.

The proceedings of the second CHAI workshop are now available online as open access. ‘While in 2021 the first workshop prioritized all those projects that showed a deep impact on finding phenomena which the human mind is unable to think of in the first place, it bears a lot of plausibility to continue the workshop series with topics on how to best process, prepare and extract the needed information. In addition, we like to maintain the idea of presenting a very diverse array of projects and applications promoting the essence of the Humanities – a most diverse field of academic disciplines’, the editors write in the introduction to the volume.

The first CHAI workshop was held in September 2021. The proceedings of this workshop are freely accessible online too.