Research in natural language processing

The main objective is to develop robust methods for the understanding and generation of both written and spoken human language, including but not limited to English. Penn is pursuing development of: (1) New mathematical and computational frameworks which are highly constrained, yet adequate to allow a simple, concise description of complex linguistic phenomena. These new frameworks are tested by the explicit encoding within each framework of a wide range of phenomena across a diverse set of human languages. (2) Both statistical and symbolic learning methods which automatically extract and effectively utilize the implicit linguistic knowledge in the Penn Treebank and the corpora of the Linguistic Data Consortium. These techniques have been tested against the performance of the best current methods.