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The Natural Language Processing Research Group, established in
1993, is one of the largest and most successful language processing
groups in the UK and has a strong global reputation.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods:
- To investigate the properties of written human language and to
model the cognitive mechanisms underlying the understanding and
production of written language (scientific focus)
- To develop novel practical applications involving the intelligent
processing of written human language by computer (engineering focus)
The group's research interests fall into the broad areas of:
- Information
Access: Building applications to improve access to information in
massive text collections, such as the web, newswires and the
scientific literature. Subtopics include: information extraction, text
mining and semantic annotation, question answering, summarization.
- Language Resources and
Architectures for NLP: Providing resources -- both data and
processing resources -- for research and development in NLP. Includes
platforms for developing and deploying real world language processing
applications, most notably GATE,
the General Architecture for Text Engineering.
- Machine Translation: Building
applications to translate automatically between human languages, allowing access to the
vast amount of information written in foreign languages and easier communication between
speakers of different languages.
- Human-Computer Dialogue Systems:
Building systems to allow spoken language interaction with computers
or embodied conversational agents, with applications in areas such as
keyboard-free access to information, games and entertainment,
articifial companions.
- Detection of Reuse and Anomaly:
Investigating techniques for determining when texts or portions of
texts have been reused or where portions of text do not fit with
surrounding text. These techniques have applications in areas such as
plagiarism and authorship detection and in discovery of hidden
content.
- Foundational Topics: Developing
applications with human-like capabilities for processing language
requires progress in foundational topics in language processing. Areas
of interest include: word sense disambiguation, semantics of time and
events.
The NLP group's research has received support from: the EU's Framework
Programmes (Frameworks 4,5, 6 and 7), the UK research councils -- the
EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC and AHRC -- and various industrial sponsors, including
GlaxoSmithKline and IBM.
The NLP group has close associations with the Speech and Hearing and Information
Retrieval research groups which carry out research into other areas of
computational processing of human language.
We also host the ICCL & CLUK Websites
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