Groups

The Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery (INK) Lab at USC is a group of reseachers working on next-generation machine intelligence techniques for knowledge-guided machine learning, information extraction, and knowledge graph reasoning. Our research spans across machine learning, natural language processing and data mining, with a focus on weak-supervision methods for modeling natural-language text data and graph-structured data. We are excited about both developing computational models and building practical systems for real-world applications. Led by Prof. Xiang Ren, the INK lab is also part of USC Machine Learning Center, NLP Community@USC, and ISI Center on Knowledge Graphs.

SAIL conducts fundamental and applied research in human-centered information processing, with an emphasis on speech, audio, language, biomedical and multi-modal signal processing, machine learning and pattern recognition. SAIL’s research applications and systems development especially focus on domains with direct societal relevance including in human health and well being (both basic and translational research such as in the domains of autism, pediatric obesity and disordered speech production), education (technologies for literacy and language learning) and defense (signal and pattern classification, speech recognition and translation, virtual human-based systems and audio-visual scene analysis).

The Natural Language Group at the USC Information Sciences Institute conducts research in natural language processing and computational linguistics, developing new linguistic and mathematical techniques to make better technology. We have a wide range of ongoing projects, including those related to statistical machine translation, question answering, summarization, ontologies, information retrieval, and natural language generation.

The ICT Dialogue Group has been working since 2000 on studying human dialogue, developing computational models of dialogue, building dialogue systems to interact with people, and building dialogue components of Integrated Virtual Humans.

The Narrative Group at ICT investigates storytelling and the human mind, exploring how people experience, interpret and narrate the events in their lives. Research efforts include the large-scale analysis of narrative in social media, the logical formalization of commonsense reasoning, and the creation of story-based learning environments.