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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.

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

Importance of context in machine translation

research — Mar 18, 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.

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.

James Henderson, Idiap senior researcher, appointed as Action Editor for TACL

research — Dec 05, 2017

James Henderson, who has joined Idiap in September 2017 and is now leading Idiap's Natural Language Understanding group, has recently been appointed as Action Editorfor the "Transactions of Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)" journal.

Idiap Researchers Nikolaos Pappas and Andrei Popescu-Belis awarded at the IJCNLP 2017

research — Dec 05, 2017

The paper "Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification" by Nikolaos Pappas and Andrei Popescu-Belis has received the Best Paper Award at the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, held on November 27-December 1 in Tapei, Taiwan.

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

Several Openings for Cross-Disciplinary Senior Researcher positions — by admin — last modified Mar 01, 2021: With the growth of the institute, in addition to increased Federal funding to further support its activities, Idiap is opening several additional permanent senior research scientist positions.

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