Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC)

Prof. Sophia Ananiadou, director of NaCTeM and Prof. Angelo Cangelosi’s Cognitive Robotics Lab at Manchester are collaborating with the Artificial Intelligence Research Center (AIRC), in Tokyo, Japan, to carry out fundamental NLP and text mining research. AIRC is directed by Prof. Jun’ichi Tsujii, who also holds the position of Professor of Text Mining at the University of Manchester, and is NaCTeM’s scientific advisor. This research was also linked with Prof. Sophia Ananiadou’s Alan Turing fellowship. AIRC is exploring possible directions of NLP/machine learning research with ATI fellows, and funding was allocated to facilitate this exploration.

Aims and Objectives

The strands of work that are being undertaken as part of this project include the following:

Deep-Learning Based Natural Language Processing
The aim of this work is to build practical deep learning-based methods for various natural language processing tasks, including document clustering, named entity recognition, coreference resolution and relation extraction, along with annotated corpora that can aid in their development. Work on entity detection has tackled important issues such as specific handling of nested entities (entities embedded in other entities) and polysemous entities (entities annotated with multiple semantic types), as well as splitting words into sub-words to better handle rare and unknown words. Novel relation extraction work has investigated different approaches that can recognise both intra-sentence and inter-sentence relations.

Robotics Research
Joint research between AIST-AIRC and Prof. Cangelosi’s Cognitive Robotics Lab at Manchester concerns the field of cognitive robotics and human-robot interaction. One area investigates the use of deep learning models for language and non-verbal communication in joint object manipulation tasks with humanoid robots (In collaboration with Tetsuya Ogata). The second area looks at novel experiments on machine learning approaches to dialog and human-robot interaction in the context of social robots for older people (with Kristiina Jokinen).

For more details about our collaboration with AIRC, please contact Prof Sophia Ananiadou.