NLP Research Group: natural language processing and computational linguistics,
with applications in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences

The Group conducts research on core problems in NLP

• how language conveys information,
• how information can be extracted from text,
• how latent structure can be learned from observed data.

Our work combines empirical and theoretical approaches. We work on projects with partners in the academia, industry and government organizations, in various application domains.

People:

Jose María Hoya Quecedo Jue Hou Sardana Ivanova Anisia Katinskaia Max Koppatz Lidia Pivovarova Tomi Rikander Group leader: Roman Yangarber

Visitors: Jukka Perkiö Michal Trzos Recent alumni: Javad Nouri Mian Du Hannes Wettig Peter von Etter ...

Projects:

• PULS:
• Analysis of big-data streams of news media. Information Extraction (IE): find facts and events in text, collect them into a data base, and perform reasoning over collected data.
  Methods: neural networks, unsupervised and weakly-supervised learning.
  Domains: general news, business intelligence, epidemiological surveillance, cross-border security and criminal activity.
• Collaboration: Please see project page.
• Funding: Tekes/BusinessFinland, European Commission


• Revita:
  • Computational modeling for supporting language learning. Revitalization of endangered languages: from Finno-Ugric, Turkic, and other language families.
  • Collaboration: Yle, Opetushallitus.
  • Funding: Academy of Finland, Project FinUgRevita.
  
  
• Etymon:
  • Computational models of language evolution. Modeling how the Finnish language genetically relates to the Uralic language family, based on data in etymological databases.
    Methods: information theory, the Minimum Description Length principle (MDL).
    Applying the methods beyond the Uralic family—Turkic, Indo-European and Khoisan.
  • Collaboration:
    • Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Institute of Linguistics.
    • The StarLing Project, a collection of etymological databases for many language families of the world.
    • KOTUS: enhancement of the Finnish etymological dictionary "Suomen Sanojen Alkuperä". (The database is proprietary, and will be released for public access soon.)
  • Funding: jointly funded by the Academy of Finland and the Russian Fund for the Humanities, project UraLink.
  
  
• SIGSLAV: Special Interest Group on Slavic Natural Language Processing of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Prior projects

• Etymological BANANAS:
  • Research Focus: Modeling genetic relationships among members of a language family, using methods from population genetics. Application to etymological data from different language families, starting with Uralic and Turkic.
  • Collaboration:
    • J Corander's group, at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics: population-genetics models. Part of the COIN Center of Excellence of the Academy of Finland
    • Russian Academy of Sciences: analysis of etymological databases, the StarLing Project
    • KOTUS: etymological databases of the Uralic language family.
• Clarin:
  • the EU Clarin project for building infrastructures for linguistic resources.
• ContentFactory:
  • Collaboration between PULS and the TermFactory project at the Department of Modern Languages, focusing on large-scale ontology creation and maintenance, for text-analysis tasks.