Category: Uncategorised

25 May 202625 May 2026

Chasing the Hansard “Spirit”: My Glasgow Secondment Story

Beaming with excitement: The secondment started with a campus tour, led by Michael Pidd, the Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (University of Sheffield)

One of the greatest perks of being an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) within CASCADE is the uniquely designed secondments at renowned institutions. For my PhD project, The ‘Spirit’ in the Chamber: Capturing Zeitgeist in UK parliamentary debates, I had an invaluable opportunity to engage in an intensive 11-week secondment at the University of Glasgow from 30 October 2025, together with my fellow Sheffield ESR, Maria. I enthusiastically dived deep into the quirky yet fascinating history of parliamentary reporting, stories of data mining throughout the years, and hopeful prospects of yet another captivating research story of the UK parliamentary discourse.

31 March 202631 March 2026

Major Developments in Morocco – An ESR tale from EACL by Bách Phan-Tất

Main conference room at EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco

Travelling to the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in Rabat, Morocco was one of the highlights of my PhD so far. It was my very first paper presentation at my very first big conference, so naturally I arrived with equal amounts of excitement, nerves, and the vague feeling that I should try very hard not to look too obviously starstruck.

24 February 202624 February 2026

Learning the Ropes in Leuven – ESR Maria Flores Alejo reflects on the first CASCADE convention.

On the 28th and 29th of January the CASCADE Network came together once again for what would be our 4th official reunion and first convention, this time the venue was the charming town of Leuven, Belgium. Unfortunately, since we arrived the evening before the start of the convention after a full day of travel from Sheffield, our wanderlust would have to wait.

One and a half years in, the network seems to have developed a tacit routine during these meet-ups with some of us choosing to use breakfast time to socialize and talk about the upcoming activities while others prefer to catch-up on sleep. However, this time, the interactions had an underlying nervousness as ESRs prepared to present their research projects to both peers and supervisors.

Presenting my research project to the CASCADE team in Leuven

21 January 202621 January 2026

A November of AI: From Finnish to Nordic Networking by CASCADE ESR Yu Wu

Last November was a busy month for me. I had the chance to attend two major events back-to-back: the FCAI AI Day in Espoo and the Nordic AI Meet (NAIM) in Sweden. I gave the same talk at both events: “Detecting Latin in Historical Books with Large Language Models.” This represents the core of my PhD work during my first year. I also presented a poster at NAIM.

4 September 202521 January 2026

ESR Ángela Gómez speaks on CASCADE’s third reunion in Helsinki

It was Tuesday, August 19^th,2025, and we were travelling to the third CASCADE MSCA Doctoral Network training camp. This time around, it was taking us to Helsinki, and the trip to the airport reminded me of how far we would be going this time (until now, the KU Leuven team had travelled by train for every meeting). What would we learn? What sights would we see? What connections would we strengthen?

Camp Day One: Wednesday, August 20^th

*Training camp opening session, led by Helsinki’s Mikko Tolonen.* Photo by Emer Yip

As everyone slowly started coming down from their hotel rooms, ready for breakfast and our first day of training sessions, I started seeing familiar faces. Over breakfast with a few of my fellow ESRs, we excitedly discussed travel mishaps, current and past projects, and our expectations for the days to come. After eating, we all met in the hotel lobby (ESRs and supervisors alike) for what has now become a tradition: walking together to where the camp would take place. On this occasion, it would be the main building of the University of Helsinki.

22 May 202522 May 2025

New CASCADE Substack!

The CASCADE project has launched a Substack: ‘Language and Technology’!

This Substack offers a window into the research and reflections of CASCADE’s doctoral projects across the five partner universities: University College Cork, University of Helsinki, KU Leuven, Universität des Saarlandes, and the University of Sheffield.

Posts include insights into computational linguistics and text analytics; perspectives on the social, ethical, and cultural implications of AI and natural language processing; commentary on the role of language in the data economy; and interviews, explainers, and research highlights for both scholarly and general audiences.

The first post, written by CASCADE Early Stage Researcher Sofía Aguilar based at USAAR, is now live at:

https://languagetechnology.substack.com/

Pop on over and hit the subscribe button to learn more about the work of our research team!
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CASCADE is a collaboration between University College Cork, University of Sheffield, University of Helsinki, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Universität des Saarlandes. Funded by Horizon Europe under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks and the UKRO.

26 March 202527 May 2025

2nd CASCADE Training & Research Camp at USAAR

The CASCADE team including guest researchers Haim Dubossarsky and Tanja Säily at USAAR

The second CASCADE Training and Research Camp took place from 12-13 March at the University of Saarland in Saarbrücken, where the full group of 10 ESRs and their PhD supervisors, and a roster of guest researchers came together to learn from, and with each other, at the USAAR Campus Innovation Center. Two packed days of activities included ESR group work & brainstorming sessions; poster presentations and even a guided tour of 500 years of Saarbrücken history at the SAAR Historical Museum.

The programme included several guest researcher presentations by experts in the field of Historical Sociolinguistics, Computational Lexicography and Natural Language Processing, as well as an insightful presentation by a former Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher on the highs and lows of the ESR journey. All in all, it was a very well spent spent two days in Saarbrücken and the team returned to their respective institutions with heads filled with new information, new ideas and further plans for future collaborations.