Language is the universal medium through which we exchange our most important news, our most promising ideas, and our most heartfelt gestures. Embedded in the language we use, and the text we write, is a wealth of human knowledge. We report facts. We argue for beliefs. We share our emotions and thoughts. However, the way humans communicate this knowledge is complex. Our language is imprecise, ambiguous, and highly variable, as we rely on collectively shared context to fill in information that is not explicitly stated.
If machines are going to understand the world we live in and help us achieve our goals in it, they must extract the deeper meaning of the language we use. Our research at EPFL develops innovative automated language understanding tools to support diverse, real-world applications that enable novel interactions between humans and machines, assist collaborations between humans, and discover insights into human experiences.
