TALARIS : Natural Language Processing: representation, inference and semantics (project-team)

About the project : Project-Team site Activity report Videos and photos Research reports Theses Theme : Sym Symbolic systems Nancy - Grand Est research center

This Research-Team is a follow-up of LANGUE ET DIALOGUE Research-Team

Project-Team Presentation

LORIA joint team with CNRS, University Henri Poincaré, University Nancy 2 and INPL.

The aim of the TALARIS project-team is to investigate semantic phenomena in natural language from a computational perspective. More concretely, TALARIS's goal is to develop a computational architecture for the semantic processing of French, to explore the linguistic and computational issues involved in such areas as natural language generation, textual entailment recognition, discourse and dialogue modelling, pragmatics, and multilinguality in multimedia, and to investigate the interplay between representation and inference in natural language meaning.

Research themes

The work of the TALARIS project-team can be subdivided into four overlapping and mutually supporting categories.

• Computational semantics

  These theme is devoted to the theoretical and computational issues involved in building semantic representations for natural language. Special emphasis is placed on developing large scale semantic coverage for the French Language, and on applying these tools to natural language generation and textual entailment.

• Discourse, Dialogue and Pragmatics

  This theme is devoted to developing theoretical and computational models of discourse and dialogue processing, the inferential impact of pragmatic factors; the group is working towards the development of full scale dialogue systems.

• Logics for natural language inference and knowledge representation.

  This theme is devoted to theoretical and computational tools for working with logics suitable for natural language inference and knowledge representation. Special emphasis is placed on hybrid logic, description logics, higher order logic, and Discourse Representation Theory.

• Multilinguality for Multimedia

  This theme centers round the Multi Lingual Information Framework, a formalism for representing and dealing with multilingual textual information. A preliminary version can deal with subtitling of video content, dialogue prompts, menus in interactive TV, and descriptive information for multimedia scenes.

International and industrial relations

• Grupo de Lógica y Computabilidad, Departmento de Computación, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universdad de Buenos Aires.
  Computational Logic, Algorithmic Randomness and Computability, and, Natural Language Processing.
• Grupo de Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural, Sección de Ciencias de la Computacion, Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba.
  Artificial Intelligence, with special emphasis in data based Natural Language Processing.
• Programming, Logic and Intelligent Systems (PLIS) at Roskilde University.
  Non-classical logics (mainly modal, temporal, and hybrid logics).
• Department of Informatics and Mathematical Modelling (IMM), Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
  Logic and the application of logic in computer science, specially on tableau based decision methods for hybrid logics.
  
• Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) and the University of the Saarland.
  Research in computational semantics. Development of robust natural language processing tools and resources for French.

Scientific leader

Patrick BLACKBURN     [homepage]
+33 3 83 59 30 52
Patrick.Blackburn@loria.fr
Secretary : +33 3 83 59 20 26