Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Founded in 1992, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AiLab) at IMCS, University of Latvia conducts research and development in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) in several directions:

• Speech-to-text transcription and text-to-speech synthesis.
• Syntactic and semantic parsing for natural language understanding.
• Neural language modelling and scalable NLP.
• Controlled natural language for knowledge representation, and text generation.
• Creation of language resources for NLP / ML and digital humanities.
• Application of deep learning for language & vision tasks and human-robot interaction.

Our mission is to provide resources and tools for the Latvian language in multilingual environment. AiLab has recently implemented multiple research and industry-driven projects in the field of language technology.

In cooperation with the national information agency LETA, the international broadcaster Deutsche Welle and other partners, we have developed scalable solutions for the global media monitoring and multilingual content creation. We have developed a text processing system for National Library of Latvia, dealing with part-of-speech tagging and named-entity recognition in a billion word corpus of OCR-scanned texts. We also collaborate with Riga Stradins University, developing tools for monitoring user-generated content in news portal communities and for analysing parliamentary debates. In collaboration with Riga East University Hospital, we have developed a Latvian speech recognition platform for the medical domain.

Our researchers successfully participate in international NLP and ML competitions like SemEval and TAC KBP. At SemEval-2016, our team achieved the top result in the task on Meaning Representation Parsing, while at SemEval-2017 – the top result in the subtask on AMR-to-English Generation. At SemEval-2023, our team placed 3rd among European teams in the task on Complex Named Entity Recognition.

Currently, we are implementing several applied research projects funded by European Union (Horizon 2020), European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), Latvian Council of Science and Ministry of Education and Science.