Laboratoire d'Analyse et de Traitement du Langage (LATL)

The LATL is a research center in computational linguistics, attached to the Department of Linguistics of the University of Geneva. Created in the early 90s, it now has a dozen collaborators (teachers, researchers, doctoral students), from different backgrounds, such as linguists, computer linguists, psycholinguists, computer scientists, and translators.  Research undertaken at LATL in recent years has focused on different facets of automatic natural language processing. The main area of ​​research is the syntactic analysis of sentence structure (parsing) and the development of lexical databases and electronic dictionaries. Syntactic analysis is the core of several applications: generation of speech from text (text-to-speech), terminology extraction, computer-assisted language learning, text analysis (text mining) and machine translation. The remarkable performance of these applications is due to the precise, complete and detailed description of the words analyzed. We are also studying machine learning techniques to build dictionaries and to analyze corpora in order to automatically extract collocations (conventional combinations of words). The systems developed at LATL cover several languages: French, English, German, Italian; other languages ​​have more recently been taken into account: Spanish, Romanian, Greek and Russian.

Doctoral theses defended  de doctorat soutenues

• Thierry Etchegoyhen: Procedural Grammar (2001)
• Anne Faltin Vandeventer: Syntactic Error Diagnosis in the Context of Computer Assisted Language Learning (2003)
• Violeta Seretan: Collocation Extraction Based on Syntactic Parsing (2008)
• Jorge Antonio Leoni de Léon: Modèle d'analyse lexico-syntaxique des locutions espagnoles (2008)