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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

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.

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.

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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.