Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

The Alpage team is specialized in Language modeling, Computational linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). These fields are considered central in the new Inria strategic plan, and are indeed of crucial importance for the new information society. Applications of this domain of research include the numerous technologies grouped under the term of “language engineering”. This includes domains such as machine translation, question answering, information retrieval, information extraction, text simplification, automatic or computer-aided translation, automatic summarization, foreign language reading and writing aid. From a more research-oriented point of view, experimental linguistics can be also viewed as an “application” of NLP.

NLP, the domain of Alpage, is a multidisciplinary domain which studies the problems of automated understanding and generation of natural human languages. It requires an expertise in formal and descriptive linguistics (to develop linguistic models of human languages), in computer science and algorithmics (to design and develop efficient programs that can deal with such models), in applied mathematics (to acquire automatically linguistic or general knowledge) and in other related fields. It is one of the specificities of Alpage to put together NLP specialists with a strong background in all these fields (in particular, linguistics for Paris 7 Alpage members, computer science and algorithmics for Inria members).

Natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into human language. Alpage focuses on text understanding and generation (by opposition to speech processing and generation).

One specificity of NLP is the diversity of human languages it has to deal with. Alpage focuses on French and English, but does not ignore other languages, through collaborations, in particular with those that are already studied by its members or by long-standing collaborators (e.g., Spanish, Polish, Persian and others). This is of course of high relevance, among others, for language-independant modeling and multi-lingual tools and applications.

Alpage's overall objective is to develop linguistically relevant and computationally efficient tools and resources for natural language processing and its applications. More specifically, Alpage focuses on the following topics:

• Research topics:

  • deep syntactic modeling and parsing. This topic includes, but is not limited to, development of advanced parsing technologies, development of large-coverage and high-quality adaptive linguistic resources, and use of hybrid architectures coupling shallow parsing, (probabilistic and symbolic) deep parsing, and (probabilistic and symbolic) disambiguation techniques;

  • modeling and processing of language at a supra-sentential level (discourse modeling and parsing, anaphora resolution, etc);

  • NLP-based knowledge acquisition techniques

• Application domains:

  • experimental linguistics;

  • automatic information extraction (both linguistic information, inside a bootstrapping scheme for linguistic resources, and document content, with a more industry-oriented perspective);

  • text normalization, automatic and semi-automatic spelling correction;

  • text mining;

  • automatic generation;

  • with a more long-term perspective, automatic or computer-aided translation.