Computational Linguistics & Text Mining Lab
The Computational Linguistics and Text Mining Lab (CLTL) is lead by Prof.Dr. Piek Vossen and Prof. Dr Antske Fokkens . CLTL is part of the Department of Language, Literature and Communication of the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and of the Network Institute.
Who are we?
We are researchers that love language and love technology. Now that Large Language Models form the heart of AI, our research and teaching has a strong focus on studying, building and using Large Language Models. What do these models actually model? What can they do and what cannot they do? How to tackle well-known issues such as hallucination and bias? How to make them transparent and responsible? How are hundreds of languages combined in a single crosslingual model? For many people, Large Language Models are mysterious black boxes. At CLTL we try to shed some light on them.
Many of these questions are at the center of our research but also explained and discussed in our teaching. Our students learn to build Language Models, study them thoroughly and also train them for various tasks ranging from sentiment and emotion detection, named entity recognition, event extraction to specific medical applications.
We see language as a reference system that connects people and systems to their perception of the world. Identity, reference and perspectives are central themes in our research and are studied in combination. In our research on conversational Robots, many of our ideas come together: http://makerobotstalk.nl In this project, we try to build robots that communicate with people in real-world situations taking perception of the contexts into account and shared common ground.
What we teach you as a student
With our strong research background, CLTL prepares students for academic careers in Computational Linguistics and AI, evidenced by many of our students that continue their passion as PhDs in the field. Other students find their way in industry, start-ups and larger organisations or government as our master provides you with all the skills to apply technology built with Large Language Models. If you are interested to study with us and become ready for the job market with your language technology and AI skills, check out our teaching programmes: research and text mining.
Many of our students started with a background in linguistics only but within a year they learned to use their skills and knowledge to analyse language as data. Other students have a technical or AI background but want to specialise in Large Language Models and language applications such as conversational AI. These students get a deeper understanding of language as data and what Language Models really are. Follow this link for examples of our student projects to see what they did and what you can learn to do as well.
Our products
CLTL has created a wide range of Natural Language Processing software and resources, including Large Language Models on https://huggingface.co/CLTL. All our software is open source and can be accessed through our Github repository. An overview of our language resources: annotated corpora and lexicons, can be found here. Well-known examples are the Open Dutch Wordnet and Framenet as important lexical resources for Dutch.
Our research not only targets Dutch and English as a language but also other languages in the world. An important project is the Global Wordnet Association and the building of the Global Wordnet Grid: this project aims at representing many vocabularies of languages as semantic networks or wordnets and combining them through a universal index of meaning. Building and studying this grid will tell us more about universalities and idiosyncrasies of languages and likewise about the roles and functions of words and expressions.
Video explaining 5 years of research in the Spinoza-projects “Understanding Language by Machines“, 2019
Video explaining NewsReader‘s Reading Machine — Example of one of CLTL’s projects
Lecture (in Dutch) Prof. dr. Piek Vossen at Paradiso Amsterdam: ‘To Communicate with an Imperfect Robot — Get It?’ March 25, 2018