Grant: Alliance Grants

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a field of artificial intelligence devoted to making computers handle tasks where natural language (like English or French) is a key part, for instance search engines and chatbots. As seen recently with ChatGPT, many modern NLP approaches require substantial amounts of text data to create powerful models. This research project investigates novel approaches for NLP in the quite common scenario where this data is scarce, but where knowledge engineering and reasoning can alleviate the problem of discovering powerful and efficient algorithms. The strategies developed will tackle knowledge extraction from text, modeling knowledge and reasoning on it, and economically important applications, notably in the fields of automated question answering and chatbots. At this pivotal moment of commercialization of large language models (LLMs), our industry partners will thus be able to improve the quality of their services, contribute to Canada's economic development, and remain competitive internationally.