As artificial intelligence technologies reach everyday new performances, their energy cost is also increasing significantly. Idiap researchers are proposing a novel approach to address this challenge during a period of rising energy costs.
Natural Language Understanding
In our group, we model summarization, abstraction (textual entailment), machine translation, knowledge extraction, syntactic structure, and lexical semantics, among other natural language processing (NLP) problems. We develop deep learning models of the discovery and prediction of entities and their relations at multiple levels of representation for multiple tasks.
Group News
Idiap Research Institute and the School of Engineering at EPFL invite applications for the directorship of Idiap. The successful candidate will also hold a faculty position as full professor at EPFL School of Engineering.
Demonstrating a significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art results, James Henderson and Alireza Mohammadshahi of the Natural language understanding group propose a novel approach. Their work was presented during the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on April 21, 2021.
Perfect understanding of a text is not possible without context. Same goes for a computer. It cannot do a good translation without understanding what is really defined in a text. At Idiap, Lesly Miculicich conducted research to make this possible through her thesis which she successfully defended last February.
An article, co-authored by Prof. Andrei Popescu-Belis, has received the Best Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). The article presents the research of Dr Nikolaos Pappas - a postdoc at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny - under the supervision of Prof. Popescu-Belis, former head of Idiap’s Natural Language Processing group.
Group Job Openings
Our group is regularly posting job openings ranging from internships to researcher positions. To check the opportunities currently available or to submit a speculative applications use the link below.Our group is regularly posting job openings ranging from internships to researcher positions. To check the opportunities currently available or to submit a speculative applications use the link below.
Current Group Members
The group is led by James Henderson.

HENDERSON, James (Brinton)
(Senior Research Scientist)
- website

MARFURT, Andreas
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

BEHJATI, Melika
(PhD Student / Research Assistant)
- website

COMAN, Andrei (Catalin)
(PhD Student / Research Assistant)
- website

FEHR, Fabio (James)
(PhD Student / Research Assistant)
- website

EL ZEIN, Dina
(PhD Student / Research Assistant)
- website
Alumni
- BHATT, Chidansh
- GASNIER, Catherine
- HABIBI, Maryam
- HAJLAOUI, Najeh
- HONNET, Pierre-Edouard
- KARIMI MAHABADI, Rabeeh
- LE, Quoc Anh
- LISON, Pierre
- LIYANAPATHIRANA, Jeevanthi Uthpala
- LOAICIGA, Sharid
- LUONG, Ngoc-Quang
- MAHDABI, Parvaz
- MATENA, Lukas
- MEYER, Braida (Regula)
- MEYER, Thomas
- MICULICICH, Lesly (Sadiht)
- MOHAMMADSHAHI, Alireza
- PAPPAS, Nikolaos
- PATEL, Kumar
- POPESCU-BELIS, Andrei
- PU, Xiao
- REKABSAZ, Navid
- YAZDANI, Majid
Active Research Grants
Past Research Grants
- AROLES - Automatic Recommendation of Lectures and Snipets
- COMTIS - Improving the coherence of machine translation output by modeling intersentential relations
- DOMAT - On-demand Knowledge for Document-level Machine Translation
- FAVEO - Accelerating online information discovery through context-driven and behaviour-based personalization of search
- HYBRID - Hybrid Recommender System
- LAOS - Learning Representations of Abstraction in Text
- MODERN - Modeling discourse entities and relations for coherent machine translation
- NMTBENCHMARK - Training and Benchmarking Neural MT and ASR Systems for Swiss Languages
- REMUS - REMUS: Re-ranking Multiple Search Results for Just-in-Time Document Recommendation
- SARAL - Summarization and domain-Adaptive Retrieval of Information Across Languages