The LKE Research group is interested in two major topics:

1. Language Engineering, and
2. Knowledge Engineering.

Although we are also considering research works associated with:

1. Human Computer Interaction
2. Automation

Some research topics associated to each major topic follow:

• Language Engineering:
  • Information Retrieval
  • Text Categorization
  • Semantic Analysis of Data
  • Multilingual Information Analysis

• Knowledge Engineering:
  • Knowledge Repersentation
  • Logic-Based Reasoning
  • Non-Monotonic Reasoning
  • Data Mining
  • Pattern Recognition

Research Topic: Language Engineering

This topic is related with those technologies that make it possible to create tools aiming to help human beings to use computational media without abandon the regular use of natural language as an interaction and information exchange medium. In this sense, the language engineering research topic considers two specific topics that complement the student profile in theoretical and applied research: computational linguistics and language engineering.

On the one hand, computational linguistics is a multidisciplinar field of linguistics and computer science that employs computational methods for studying and analyzing the human natural language. In order to fulfill its goals, computational linguistics attempts to model natural language through computational paradigms using a logic representation. Such models are not focused in any linguistic area in particular but in a sum of interdisciplinary fields in which are involved linguists, computer scientists specialized in artificial intelligence, cognitive psychologists, experts in logic, among others.

Some particular case studies of computational linguistics are the following ones:

• Corpus linguistics aided by computers
• Syntactic parsing for natural language
• Lemmatizers and part of speech taggers design
• Logic-based natural language processing
• Statistical-based natural language processing
• Relationship between formal and natural languages
• Linguistic-based models for analysis, identification, representation and/or generation of human sentiments

On the other hand, language engineering covers the creation of computational systems for natural language processing whose outputs and costs are predictable and measurable. A recent trend of language engineering is the use of semantic web technologies for the construction, storing, processing and retrieval of data associated with human language that can be processed automatically by computers.

Some particular case studies for language engineering are the following ones:

• Information retrieval
• Automatic summarization
• Voice recognition
• Automatic evaluation, construction and population of ontologies
• Visualization systems associated with language processing
• Web semantic applications
• Automatic translation
• Dialogs

Research Topic: Knowledge Engineering

This topic is a modern discipline part of artificial intelligence aiming to design and develop expert sytems (or knowledge-based systems). It is supported by instructional methodologies, computer science and information technologies, attempting to represent human knowledge and human reasoning for particular domains inside of an artificial system.

Since a knowledge engineer is not an expert in the particular field to be modeled, as well as, the domain expert has not experience modeling his knowledge in a general computational system, the job of knowledge engineers is to extract human experts knowledge for a given area and codify such knowledge so that it can be be automatically processed by a computational system.

Knowledge engineering brings together scientists, technology and methodology in order to process human knowledge. The aims of this research topic is to extract, articulate and automate knowledge of a human expert. It is close related with mathematical logic, considering aspects of cognitive science and socio-cognitive engineering, where the knowledge is produced by socio-cognitive aggregates (mainly human beings) and structured according to our own knowledge about how reasoning and logic works in humanity. A recent area of research is meta-cognitive engineering, which evolves from a new formal systemic approach for the development of a unified knowledge and intelligence theory.

Some particular case studies for knowledge engineering are the following ones:

• Problem evaluation
• Knowledge-base system development, maintenance, revision and evaluation
• Information acquisition, information and knowledge structure and preferences
• Implementation of structured knowledge in knowledge databases
• Validation and verification of knowledge stored in databases
• Knowledge representation

The research group Language Knowledge Engineering (LKE) is structured according to the interests of members. The following table indicates a summary of such interests: