If you have been following my blog lately, you will already know what Human Language Technologies (HLT) are, as well as some of the most relevant figures that are currently investigating this field. In this post what I would like to do is to start showing you some examples of the best research centres that we have today.
Main entrance to the DFKI
The first centre that we are going to mention due to its great importance is the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). The DFKI, Germany’s leading research centre in the area of innovative software technology, has facilities in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen, and a project office in Berlin. It has been recognized as a remarkable “centre of excellence” since its foundation as a nonprofit organization in 1988 by several renowned German IT companies and two research facilities. Nowadays, with an overall annual budget of more than € 25 million, the DFKI works hard in its “Living Labs” in order to launch innovative and technological solutions and products for its customers.
But the most interesting division of the DFKI for us is the Language Technology Lab (Saarbrücken), whose mission, as it is announced in its website, is “the improvement of language technology through novel computational techniques for processing text, speech and knowledge, as well as the development of a deeper understanding of human language and thought”.
Monument at the DFKI
The Language Technology Lab, headed by Hans Uszkoreit, is currently working, for example, in these projects: automatically associating recognized information with related information and thus building up collective knowledge, automatically structuring and visualizing extracted information, processing information encoded in multiple languages.
In addition, the DFKI divulges regularly a whole series of publications about Human Language Technology topics. Taking all this into account we realize how important this research centre is in Germany, and, by extension, in Europe.
References:
- German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence website (2009). (English version) Retrieved: 21:42, March 7, 2009, from
http://www.dfki.de/web - German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. “Language Technology Lab” website (2009). (English version) Retrieved: 21:44, March 7, 2009, from
http://www.dfki.de/lt/
(Note: in the future this article could be modified several times in order to include more up-to-date information.)
