Research group Languages, formal or natural, permeate our intellectual and practical lives. When agents, computer or human, wish to communicate something, they must encode it in some type of language. We study how languages can be processed based on their structure, and how their semantics or meaning can be extracted.
Languages are typically defined by syntactic rules or well-formedness constraints, and their sentences are commonly associated with some type of semantics or meaning. Moreover, language is usually embedded in the context of other information-bearing content. Perhaps the most obvious example is video, where language appears in the form of text (subtitles) and speech, but there is also visual content and there may be metadata embedded in the video.
The research group Foundations of Language Processing studies the theoretical and practical aspects of representing language on computers, and its interconnection with other sources of information. The work of the group spans from the theoretical analysis of formal languages as a theoretical basis for XML and linguistic applications to the study, practical implementation, and application of multimodal media analysis.
Johanna Björklund receives funding for research on semantic parsing of multimodal data.
