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

Idiap is looking for its next director
institute — Jan 14, 2022

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.

A novel architecture to improve syntactic analysis
research — last modified Apr 21, 2021

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.

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.

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


FEHR, Fabio (James)
(Research Assistant)
- website


COMAN, Andrei (Catalin)
(Research Assistant)
- website


BEHJATI, Melika
(Research Assistant)
- website


MOHAMMADSHAHI, Alireza
(Research Assistant)
- website


MARFURT, Andreas
(Research Assistant)
- website


MAI, Florian
(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)
  • PAPPAS, Nikolaos
  • PATEL, Kumar
  • POPESCU-BELIS, Andrei
  • PU, Xiao
  • REKABSAZ, Navid
  • YAZDANI, Majid

Active Research Grants

Past Research Grants