An Introduction to the Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics of State Ministry of Education

Affiliated with Peking University, the Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics of State Ministry of Education (Hereafter referred as “The Lab” ) is constituted by researchers from  the Institute of Computational Linguistics at School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Chinese Department, the Department of Language Information Engineering at School of Software and Microelectronics, and School of Foreign Languages.

On the whole, the Lab positions itself in establishing both theoretical and practical systems for natural language understanding cored by Chinese language by making full use of the advantage in interdisciplinary integration of computer science and linguistics, keeping up with the forefront of international academia, the national economic construction and the key strategic needs of China.

The Lab’s mission is to build a base for interdisciplinary research in both science and liberal arts and talent cultivation that will exert major influence both at home and abroad on natural language processing.

Based on the above, the Lab is conducting innovative, systematic and pioneering research on the following aspects:

• Theoretical aspect: By making full us of the advantage of multidisciplinary integration in linguistics, computer science and cognitive science, the Lab devotes itself to exploring the core of language deep understanding and establishing a large-scale theoretical base of multivariate cognition for language understanding.
• Resourceful aspect: By combining linguistic theory and computer engineering, the Lab is building a large-scale infrastructure of language knowledge resources for Chinese deep understanding based on the characteristics of Chinese language.
• Model aspect: By integrating methods of both structural learning and deep learning, the Lab is dedicated to provide solutions for large-scale complicated problems of structural learning in natural language understanding and improving the results of language deep understanding.
• Technological aspect: By combining deep learning and complex structural modeling, the Lab is researching and developing core technologies on Chinese deep computation and digging massive texts and a series of key technologies on analyzing the content of massive texts.
• Application aspect: The Lab is also developing application systems for natural language processing with the goal of serving society and pushing forward the industrial and technological reform for Chinese information processing.

The Lab is staffed with 45 tenured researchers, among whom there are 20 full professors/researchers, 18 associate professors, 6 lecturers and assistant professors and 1 secretary.

For the senior researchers, most of them have professorial titles and for the junior, most of them hold PhD degrees.