Welcome to TALAA, the research group on NLP, Machine Learning, and their Applications!


 

With the information flux (Information Tsunami!) generated by the Internet-and-multimedia-based world, handling text (as well as other media) has become of utmost importance. This is even more so if we consider the large volumes of the available texts and data that need to be handled almost instantly. Modern public and private businesses and institutions have become heavily reliant on the quick exploitation of the available data and the knowledge that can be extracted from it. Prompt decision taking and action as well as huge business opportunities await those who can reap the benefits of the Artificial Intelligence techniques that enable us to do so.

As its name suggests, the TALAA Research Group on NLP, Machine Learning, and their Applications (Équipe de recherche sur le TAL, l’Apprentissage automatique, et leurs Applications) has been formed to tackle the challenge of solving problems related to Automatic Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and related applications of these areas. A particular focus of our research is on Arabic NLP. We are also interested in ontology building and induction, Communities Of Practice, Recommendation Systems, and machine learning applications in Bio-informatics.

The utilisation of corpora being a cornerstone of NLP research, and Arabic ones being very limited in numbers and richness, our TALAA research group has been obliged to develop its own (untagged and tagged) Arabic corpora for the handling of problems like grammar induction, Q&A systems, and text summarization. We have taken it upon ourselves to gradually make our corpora available to the research community so that researchers worldwide can use them for their own research and, hopefully, contribute to enriching them on our web page. This gradual enrichment of the available corpora will ultimately help develop research on Arabic NLP, and NLP more generally.

We are also actively working on the development of state-of-the-art tools for the Arabic language in areas like grammar induction, text summarization, question-answering systems, machine translation, ontology learning, etc. Other problems that can be related to the techniques of NLP and ML are also tackled; this is the case for instance in Bioinformatics with work on Gene-Gene interaction and drug repurposing.

So… stay tuned and check our website every now and then for new products!

Research Interests of the TALAA Research Group :