Computational Linguistics

Computational Linguistics, or Language Technology, is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the computational modeling of natural language. Traditionally, research has been driven both by the theoretical goal of understanding human language and by practical applications involving natural language processing, such as systems for automatic translation, information retrieval, and human-computer dialogue. Currently, the emergence of large language models and generative AI is reshaping the field.

The Computational Linguistics group at Uppsala University has a broad research agenda with two focus areas:

• Digital philology applies computational methods to the interpretation and analysis of texts. Its applications include historical text processing, the study of historical cryptography, digital literary analysis, and the recognition of handwritten manuscripts.
• Multilingual NLP deals with both inherently multilingual tasks like machine translation and with the use of multilingual resources to support low-resource languages in tasks like dependency parsing.

The group has been involved in the development of a number of resources and tools, such as Universal Dependencies (morphosyntactically annotated corpora), PARSEME (corpora annotated for multiword expressions), Swedish Diachronic Corpus, UUParser (data-driven dependency parser).