NLP Lab
The Natural Language Processing Lab
Welcome to The NLP Lab Pages
The Natural Language Processing Lab (NLP-Lab) is focused on theoretical work and implementations of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions using hybrid approaches, empiricist, neural, probabilistic, and knowledge-driven, with a particular interest in neuro-symbolic modeling. We are also interested in Quantum NLP and AI and NLP combined with Machine Learning (ML) solutions for computer vision and multi-modal information processing.
The NLP-Lab is located at Indiana University at Bloomington. While it is mainly a local group of students and researchers with a strong interest in NLP and AI here in Indiana, it has ties to colleagues all across the country.
During the Summer of 2025, we meet in person every week in Luddy Hall (BLIF) 0002, every Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:30 PM. (See Teams and email announcements for more details.)
The Quantum AI and NLP Study Group meetings are in Luddy Hall (BLIF) 0002 every Thursday from 5:00 to 6:30 PM.
Please contact Damir Cavar if you are interested in joining the NLP-Lab meetings.
Schedule
The topics to discuss, papers to read, or presentations to listen to during the Summer of 2025 meetings:
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| 05/21/2025 | Regular meeting: LLMs, RAGs, and Knowledge Graphs: Medical abstracts to Knowledge Graphs, Ontology Learning |
Previous Meeting Schedules
News
- QED-C Discussion on the Future of Quantum and AI (March 12th, 2025) (LinkedIn post) with Cierra Choucair, Alain Chancé, Damir Cavar, Bob Coecke, Taha Selim
- Quantum Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing Conference 2025 at Indiana University in August 2025.
- Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025 announced.
- Cavar, D., Koushik Reddy Parukola, Shane Sparks (2025) Old Wine in New Bottles: Using Classical Word Embeddings in Quantum NLP Systems. Paper to be presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
- A. Karkala Pai, D. Cavar (2025) A Voice-based Detection of Parkinson’s Disease: Feature Selection and Classification Results. Paper to be presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
- Wang, R., R. Shrivastava, T. Sun, S. Lakshmi Anusha Chebolu, M. Kodandapani Naidu, T. Jayaprakash, J. Decatur, D. Cavar (2025) Improving LLM Reasoning Through Ontology-driven Knowledge Graphs: A Comparative Study of Generating Ontologies for Medical RAGs. Poster to be presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days 2025, University of Notre Dame, April 2025.
- Davis, A.S., B. Dickson, D. Cavar, D. Valdez, F.M. Tyers (2025) Advancing Adverse Drug Event Detection in Social Media Through Knowledge Graph and GraphRAG LLM Architectures. 2025 AAHB Annual Scientific Meeting, San Diego, CA. (Poster)
- Damir Cavar, Koushik Reddy Parukola, Chi Zhang (2025) Word and Text Similarity Using Classical Word Embeddings in Quantum NLP Systems. Satellite Workshop: Quantum Machine Learning in Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence at the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. Hyderabad, India.
- Muhammad S. Abdo, Yash Hatekar and Damir Cavar (2025) AMWAL: Named Entity Recognition for Arabic Financial News. In proceedings of the FinNLP-FNP-LLMFinLegal 2025 workshop at COLING 2025.
- Webinar on social media content analytics, antisemitism, and hate-speech in the 2024 Datathon and Hackathon is coming up in October 2024. See also project website and GitHub repo with notes and code
- We launched the environment for Natural Language Qu Kit (NLQK), a Quantum NLP (QNLP) library - GitHub repo, PyPi project, website
- Damir Cavar and Billy Dickson teach a course on Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs at ESSLLI 2024, see also the related research activity during Fall 2024 Knowledge Graph Extraction
- The NLP-Lab is happy to cosponsor the 2024 Datathon and Machine Learning Competition (pdf). Registration (https://go.iu.edu/8pGB) is open till June 20th, 2024.
- Our Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT) grant for Quantum NLP kick-off is officially this week, from 15th of May 2024 on! Join us to celebrate this at the NLP-Lab meeting on Wednesday 05/15/2024.
- NLP-Lab poster (2024) on Quantum Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning for VCs at the AI center, May 16th, 2024 at Indiana University Bloomington.
- NLP-Lab poster (2024) Quantum Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Luddy-Crane Summit on March 29, 2024 at Indiana University Bloomington.
- NLP-Lab poster (2024) Generative AI and Knowledge Representations. Luddy-Crane Summit on March 29, 2024 at Indiana University Bloomington.
- Damir Cavar, Billy Dickson (2024) Generative AI and Symbolic Knowledge Representations: Large Language Models, Knowledge, and Reasoning, (July/August 2024) course to be taught at the 35th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information ESSLLI 2024 in Leuven, Belgium.
Research Foci
During the 2025 academic year, the focus is on:
- Quantum NLP
- Ontology Learning: Learning higher level semantic properties from raw text and images
- Large Language Models (LLM), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Knowledge Graphs: extraction and visualization from relational databases, unstructured text, and images/videos
- Entailment and Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (and Description Logic/Semantic Web): Using Temporal Graph Neural Networks, Large Language Models, and Knowledge Graphs.
- Ellipsis and Empty Element Parsing
- Discontinuity and Non-local Dependency Processing in Natural Language Discourse
- Time and Event Annotation and NLP Technologies (TIE-ML)
In all these projects, we work on hands-on implementation of technologies, utilizing programming languages like Python and Rust, and graph or RDF libraries, as well as common graph-database systems like Apache Jena, Fluree, oxigraph, AllegroGraph, GraphDB, or Neo4j.
See for example:
If you are interested in joining our Rust tutorials with a focus on using Rust for NLP and AI or in Robotics environments (with the [Robot Operating System] (ROS)), please get in touch!
Previous projects foci:
- 2023 Datathon and Hackathon on Antisemitic and hate speech, using NLP and Machine Learning to process social media posts.
- Language Resources for Turkic Languages - Focusing on Azerbaijani
- Processing of the Mueller Report: corpus analysis, prediction models, Knowledge Graph and Event Graph extraction, time reference and sequencing along the time axis (GitHub repo). The cleaned-out text corpus with basic annotations is finally available. More data is coming soon.
- Antisemitism in Social Media
- I was organizing special meetings to refresh our knowledge of Lisp and Prolog for logic computation and reasoning, in particular, related to computational semantics and pragmatics, and probabilistic logic, integrating Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph technologies. See here… but the pandemic interfered with that. We should talk about a continuation. Please get in touch, if you are interested in Lisp / Scheme / Prolog.
Team
| Muhammad S. Abdo | Dr. Damir Cavar |
| Andrew Davis | Billy Dickson |
| James Graves | Vance Holthenrichs |
| Jiaqi Huang | Selim Kim |
| Soyoung Kim | Kumar Koushik, Telaprolu |
| Dr. Nicholas LaRacuente | Elias Naske |
| Ananth Karkala Pai | Koushik Reddy Parukola |
| Shane A. Sparks | Amy C. Stafford |
| Ling Sun | Jayapraksh Theyaneshwaran |
| Dr. Zoran Tiganj | Rong Zheng |
Former Team Members
| Aarnav | Luis Abrego |
| Nada Aggadi | Dr. Ali Abdulaziz Aljubailan |
| Abhishek Babuji | Oren Baldinger |
| Tanmayi Balla | Rohit Bapat |
| Jose P. Benavides | Aarushi Bisht |
| Jagpreet Singh Chawla | Aravind Dendukuri |
| Shreeja Deshpanbe | Ian Devine |
| Rushabh Dharia | Josephine Douglas |
| Dr. Boli Fang | Matthew Fort |
| Benjamin Glidden | Maanvitha Gongalla |
| Peace Han | Shusuke Hashimoto |
| Armando Hull | Calvin Josenhans |
| Murali Kishore Varma Kammili | Anurag Kumar |
| Akriti Kumari | Gordon Elliot Lichtstein |
| Shujun Liu | MacIntosh Phillips, John |
| Anshul Kumar Mangalapalli | Umang Mehta |
| Dr. Anthony Meyer | Khaled Mohammed |
| Dr. Ludovic Mompelat | Shreejith Panicker |
| Chaitanya Patil | Harshwardhan Raghunath Patil |
| Emily Reed | Restrepo Ramos, Dr. Falcon Dario |
| Animesh Sagar | Gopal Seshadri |
| Victor Shi | Surya Prateek Soni |
| Dhananjay Srivastava | Ashutosh Tiwari |
| Khai Anthony Willard | Dr. Yuna Won |
| Kimball Wu | Yuchen Yang |
| Chi Zhang | Yiwen Zhang |
Here is our Event Calendar with all meeting times.