About LTI
We are an academic department, a research institute, and a community working to define the future of technologies for understanding – humans understanding each other across linguistic divides, machines understanding human language and needs on our terms, and people of every background understanding the unprecedented breadth and depth of data we now have access to in ways that are intuitive, accessible and empowering.
All that we do is guided by the LTI Vision: to work collaboratively towards achieving goals in education and research through innovation, building meaningful relationships and promoting inclusive culture.
What are Language Technologies?
We view language as a set of multi-modal channels for generating, expressing, and understanding meaning. Although we began as an institute dedicated to the study of machine translation, today we define language in broader terms: from spoken words to gestures and facial expressions, from information captured in video and audio clips to the language of big data, markets and the cells in our bodies. Our researchers come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and work in a variety of fields tied together by our foundational mission, including:
- Natural Language Processing
- Computational Linguistics
- Information Extraction and Summarization
- Information Retrieval
- Question Answering
- Text Mining and Analytics
- Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Acquisition
- Language Technologies for Education
- Machine Learning
- Machine Translation
- Multimodal Computing and Interaction
- Speech Processing
- Spoken Interfaces and Dialogue Processing
Values
Inspired by Andrew Carnegie’s famous motto “My heart is in the work,” we strive to uphold values that foster scholarly rigor without sacrificing our duties to each other as humans.
Pioneering
The pioneer spirit has been in our DNA from the start: we strive to be the first and the best, to make discoveries that will change the world, and to constantly challenge ourselves to look beyond the obvious and the expected, to take the tougher paths that lead to the greater rewards.
Collaboration
Collaboration to us is two-fold: it’s the way that we work together, reach across disciplines and support each other’s work, of course. But it’s also the way that we support each other as people, looking out for each other’s needs and celebrating each other’s accomplishments.
Responsibility
Our work means nothing if we fail to contextualize it within our shared responsibilities, to each other and to the world. To that end, we remind ourselves daily to consider how our research advances the greater good of humanity and its future, how we can make time to strengthen our community, and how we can center the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion.