Applied Knowledge Representation and Natural Language Understanding Lab

Group's objective is to design and implement natural language-base technologies to approximate human communication capabilities in restricted domains. 

Communication with Computers 

The ultimate goal of Rayz’ (lab director) research has been to enable people to communicate with computers informally, using a natural language, with the full understanding of what is said, and perhaps more importantly, of what is left unsaid. Such understanding is achieved by combining the meaning extracted from natural language texts (computational linguistics and NLU) with our knowledge of the world, represented in conceptual form (knowledge representation and reasoning). 

Rayz’ group enhances technologies that benefit from full language understanding by a computer system in restricted domains, for instance, in the information security or medical texts, as well as the theoretical underpinnings of the underlying model of the phenomena of human language understanding. One of the convenient testing grounds of the model has been humor understanding (social computing), an application that has been attracting attention of both students and various popular media sources. 

Research Areas 

• Natural Language Understanding
• Knowledge Discovery and Representation
• Ontological Semantics Technology 

Current Application Areas 

• Phishing Detection
• Understanding implicit information in texts/default calculation
• Patient/Doctor interaction
• Computational humor
• Communication with people in smart residential communities and smart homes
• Chat analysis for law enforcement