Large, diachronic datasets of political discourse are hard to come across, especially for resource-lean languages such as Greek. In this paper, we introduce a curated dataset of the Greek Parliament Proceedings that extends chronologically from 1989 up to 2020. It consists of more than 1 million speeches with extensive meta-data, extracted from 5,355 parliamentary sitting record files. We explain how it was constructed and the challenges that had to be overcome. The dataset can be used for both computational linguistics and political analysis---ideally, combining the two.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has traditionally been predominantly focused on English, driven by the availability of resources, the size of the research community, and market demands. Recently, there has been a noticeable shift towards multilingualism in NLP, recognizing the need for inclusivity and effectiveness across diverse languages and cultures. Monolingual surveys have the potential to complement the broader trend towards multilingualism in NLP by providing foundational insights and resources necessary for effectively addressing the linguistic diversity of global communication. However, monolingual NLP surveys are extremely rare in literature. This study fills the gap by introducing a method for creating systematic and comprehensive monolingual NLP surveys. Characterized by a structured search protocol, it can be used to select publications and organize them through a taxonomy of NLP tasks. We include a classification of Language Resources (LRs), according to their availability, and datasets, according to their annotation, to highlight publicly-available and machine-actionable LRs. By applying our method, we conducted a systematic literature review of Greek NLP from 2012 to 2022, providing a comprehensive overview of the current state and challenges of Greek NLP research. We discuss the progress of Greek NLP and outline encountered Greek LRs, classified by availability and usability. As we show, our proposed method helps avoid common pitfalls, such as data leakage and contamination, and to assess language support per NLP task. We consider this systematic literature review of Greek NLP an application of our method that showcases the benefits of a monolingual NLP survey. Similar applications could be regard the myriads of languages whose progress in NLP lags behind that of well-supported languages.

Athens, Greece – "Let's go see something that looks really nice," says Anastasios Salis, head of information and communications technology at the Greek Migration and Asylum Ministry in Athens, before entering an airtight room sealed behind two interlocking doors, accessible only with an ID card and fingerprint scan. Beyond these doors is the ministry's newly-installed centralised surveillance room. The front wall is covered by a vast screen. More than a dozen rectangles and squares display footage from three refugee camps already connected to the system. Another screen shows the playground and another the inside of one of the containers where people socialise.

People are now able to walk through the ancient site of Olympia as it stood more than 2,000 years ago, thanks to artificial intelligence. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sport and Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced'Ancient Olympia: Common Grounds', a new collaboration to digitally preserve and restore ancient Olympia, the original home of the Olympic games, using AI. This digital revival project allows viewers around the world to explore ancient Olympia through an immersive experience via an interactive mobile app, web-based desktop experience, or a Microsoft HoloLens 2 exhibition at the Athens Olympic Museum. "Digitally preserving ancient Olympia gives people a way to walk through the site during one of history's most important periods -- brought to life in a realistic, engaging way that was never before possible. This new form of digital archiving will continue to offer a portal to another era, helping us understand what humanity has achieved in the past and reminding us of what we're capable of today," explains Microsoft in a media release about the new project.

Greece's decision to deploy machine learning in pandemic surveillance will be much-studied around the world.Credit: Konstantinos Tsakalidis/Bloomberg/Getty A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, operations researcher Kimon Drakopoulos e-mailed both the Greek prime minister and the head of the country's COVID-19 scientific task force to ask if they needed any extra advice. Drakopoulos works in data science at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and is originally from Greece. To his surprise, he received a reply from Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis within hours. The European Union was asking member states, many of which had implemented widespread lockdowns in March, to allow non-essential travel to recommence from July 2020, and the Greek government needed help in deciding when and how to reopen borders. Greece, like many other countries, lacked the capacity to test all travellers, particularly those not displaying symptoms.

To find out more, click here. With anti-migrant violence hitting a fever pitch, victims ask why Greek authorities have carried out so few arrests. How a homegrown burger joint pioneered a food revolution and decades later gave a young, politicised class its identity. Kombo Yannick is one of the many African asylum seekers braving the longer Latin America route to the US. Answer as many correct questions in 90 seconds to win the World Cup with your favourite team.