Ghent University, Belgium

Ghent University is represented in EM TTI by the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication and by the LT³ Language and Translation Technology Team, which is a highly active research group at the Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy. The actual team was not created until 2006 but nonetheless its members gained broad experience over the years in the domain of natural language processing (NLP). The research unit currently comprises about 20 researchers. The LT³ team conducts fundamental and applied research on the different aspects of NLP from a corpus-based, inductive perspective. The main focus is on the deep syntactic and semantic modeling of text and the integration of this knowledge in end-user applications. Based on the conviction that shallow representations based on lexical information are not sufficient to model text understanding, the team has heavily invested in research on named entity recognition, automatic disambiguation of word senses (WSD), anaphora resolution, hypernym and hyponym detection (ontology construction), etc. Applications the team is currently working on are: aspect-based sentiment analysis, irony detection (through participation and organisation of shared tasks and consultancy activities), monitoring of social media for suicidal/cyberbullying messages, (economic) event extraction, multilingual terminology extraction on comparable data, quality estimation of machine translated text, etc. LT³ constitutes an important partner in national and cross-national NLP projects. A courses taught in the EMTTI curriculum are strongly rooted in the research of the different lecturers. 

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