Natural Language Processing

The area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) deals with automatic processing of text and speech; including all its aspects, from analysis to synthesis (speech synthesis and text generation) as well as its combination. Basic research as well as applied research is undertaken, the former including modelling of human language processing, the latter including development of concrete systems in the form of demonstrators.

The first projects developed from the late seventies onwards dealt with natural language dialogue systems. The most well known example is the project VIE-LANG - A German Language Dialogue System. Research in this area was deepened and broadened taking into account knowledge representation in natural language understanding as well as text generation and speech synthesis.

Since 1994, we have been a member in ELSNET, the European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies.

Current research interests in this field include the application of language technology for teaching and learning of foreign languages and the extraction of structured (medical) information from natural language texts (text mining).