Natural Language Understanding

The Natural Language Understanding group works at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on representation learning for the meaning of language, attention-based deep learning models, and structured prediction. We model summarization, abstraction (textual entailment), machine translation, knowledge extraction, syntactic structure, and lexical semantics, among other 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.


Current Group Members

HENDERSON, James (Brinton)
(Senior Researcher)
- website


MARFURT, Andreas
(Research Assistant)
- website


KARIMI MAHABADI, Rabeeh
(Research Assistant)
- website


MAI, Florian
(Research Assistant)
- website


MICULICICH, Lesly (Sadiht)
(Research Assistant)
- website


MOHAMMADSHAHI, Alireza
(Research Assistant)
- website


BEHJATI, Melika
(Trainee)


Alumni

  • BHATT, Chidansh
  • GASNIER, Catherine
  • HABIBI, Maryam
  • HAJLAOUI, Najeh
  • HONNET, Pierre-Edouard
  • LE, Quoc Anh
  • LISON, Pierre
  • LIYANAPATHIRANA, Jeevanthi Uthpala
  • LOAICIGA, Sharid
  • LUONG, Ngoc-Quang
  • MAHDABI, Parvaz
  • MATENA, Lukas
  • MEYER, Braida (Regula)
  • MEYER, Thomas
  • POPESCU-BELIS, Andrei
  • YAZDANI, Majid

Current Projects

Recent Projects

Group News

Andrei Popescu-Belis, professor at HEIG-VD and former Idiap researcher, receives prize for best article
research — Jan 23, 2018

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.

Best Multimodal Paper Award to Nikolaos Pappas and co-authors at ICMR 2016
research — Jun 10, 2016

The paper "Multilingual Visual Sentiment Concept Matching" by Nikolaos Pappas, Mercan Topkara, Miriam Redi, Brendan Jou, Tao Chen, Hongyi Liu, Shih-Fu Chang has received the Best Multimodal Paper Award at the Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR), held on June 6-9 in New York.

Idiap submission to MediaEval 2013 ranked first for the video hyperlinking task
research — Nov 26, 2013

The Idiap NLP group has participated in the search and hyperlinking task at the MediaEval 2013 evaluation campaign. The NLP group was ranked first out of eleven participants on the hyperlinking task (finding video segments related to a given one) and third out of seven on the keyword video search task.

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Group Job Openings

PhD position in deep learning for natural language knowledge extraction — by admin — last modified Apr 27, 2020
The Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for PhD student positions in the field of natural language processing, developing deep learning methods for knowledge extraction from text.
Two PhD positions in deep learning for natural language understanding — by admin — last modified Jun 04, 2020
With the launch of a new ‘NCCR Evolving Language’, which is a center of excellence involves nearly 40 different research groups from a large variety of disciplines across Switzerland, the Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for two PhD student positions at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning.
Postdoc in deep learning for natural language structure prediction — by admin — last modified Jun 04, 2020
With the launch of a new ‘NCCR Evolving Language’, which is a center of excellence involves nearly 40 different research groups from a large variety of disciplines across Switzerland, the Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for a postdoctoral position at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing.

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