AI & NLP Lab
The AI and Natural Language Processing Lab and Quantum AI Study Group
Welcome to The AI & NLP Lab Pages
The AI & Natural Language Processing Lab (NLP-Lab) is focused on theoretical work and implementations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions using hybrid empiricist, neural, probabilistic, and knowledge-driven approaches, with a particular interest in neuro-symbolic modeling. We are also interested in Quantum AI and NLP combined with Machine Learning (ML) solutions for computer vision and multi-modal information processing — an ambition closely aligned with Steve Jobs’ vision in 1985.
The AI&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 AI and NLP here in Indiana, it maintains connections with colleagues across the country.
There are two independent group meetings: the NLP-Lab, which discusses general AI and NLP topics, and the Quantum AI Study Group. In addition, we organize occasional talks related to Quantum AI.
AI and NLP Lab Meetings: During the Summer of 2026, we meet in person every week in Luddy Hall (BL IF) 0002, every Wednesday from 4:00 to 5:30 PM. (See Teams and email announcements for more details.)
The Quantum AI Study Group meetings are in Luddy Hall (BL IF) 0002 every Tuesday from 4:00 to 5:30 PM.
The Quantum AI Study Group Talks are typically scheduled for Fridays at 4 PM in Luddy Hall (BL IF) 0002 or online.
Please contact Damir Cavar if you are interested in joining the AI&NLP-Lab meetings.
Schedule
The topics to discuss, papers to read, or presentations to listen to during the Summer of 2026 meetings:
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| 05/27/2026 | Regular meeting: NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project, Dove Recovery House final material and report |
| 06/03/2026 | Regular meeting: NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project |
| … |
Previous Meeting Schedules
News
- Cavar, D., Daniel Quigley, Sam Gray Miller (2026) Quantum Computing with AI Embeddings and Training of Hybrid Classical/Quantum AI Models (MLMs and LLMs). Tutorial at the 2026 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) in Nottingham, UK.
- Cavar, D. “From Vectors to Qubits: Rethinking AI Models for the Hybrid Classical–Quantum Era,” invited keynote lecture, September 16-18, 2026 at the 37th Central European Conference on Information and Intelligent Systems (CECIIS 2026), Varaždin, Croatia.
- Cavar, D., Peter Sullivan, Shane Sparks, Sam Gray Miller, Ronit Jha, Ayomide Jeje, Yanin Charoenpomsawat (2026) Training Language Models and Embeddings for Hybrid Classical/Quantum Computing. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
- Cavar, D., Naishal Nehal Shah (2026) LLM OntologyRAG - Extending a Food-Agent with a Description Logic Knowledge Representation. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
- Cavar, D., Shruthi Nagappan, Kumar Koushik Telaprolu, Amy Stafford, Maria A. Parker, Danny Valdez (2026) Detecting Emerging Drug Slang and Code Language in Social Media Posts. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
- Abdo, Muhammad S., Damir Cavar (2026) Ontology-Grounded Knowledge Graph Construction for Alzheimer’s Research. Poster presented at the Midwest Speech and Language Days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
- Cavar, D., Shane Sparks, Soren DeHaan, Ronit Jha, Ayomide Jeje, Yanin Charoenpomsawat, Sam Gray Miller (2026) Hybrid Classical-Quantum Language and World Models for AI - CBIRD, Poster presentation at the Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT) Meeting 2026 at Notre Dame, 1st of April, 2026.
- Cavar, D. “The Rise of Agentic AI and How It Will Change Our World,” March 20, 2026 at the Artificial Intelligence for Legal Professionals Conference, Center for International and Comparative Law, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.
- Cavar, D. “Hybrid Classical/Quantum Data Structures And Experiments For New AI Architectures,” March 25, 2026, Research Technologies Speaker Series, Cyberinfrastructure Building, Indiana University.
- Quantum AI Conference 2026 (website currently being updated) will be August 14th–16th on the IUI campus in Indianapolis! Stay tuned for updates!
- The Complex Bidirectional Inducer for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD) is a Language Model trained to be a fully hybrid classical/quantum model, which can be used on CPU/GPU and QPU systems without encoding loss. It is usable as a state-of-the-art text diffusion model, a BERT-style bidirectional encoder-only model, and more — code and model coming soon.
- Presentation on “Optimizing Data Structures for Hybrid Classical and Quantum Computing for AI and NLP” (Damir Cavar) and discussion at the iQafé event on December 18th, 2025.
- You can meet some of us at the Artificial Intelligence and Informatics Consortium (AI2) events at IU Indianapolis. Check out the event schedule. If you need a ride from Bloomington to Indy, get in touch with us.
- Quantum Computing for AI and NLP, presentation at the Luddy School for Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington, Undergraduate Research Experiential Learning Fall 2025.
- Substance Abuse Knowledge and AI Systems Poster, presentation at the Luddy School for Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington, Undergraduate Research Experiential Learning Fall 2025.
- Quantum Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing Conference 2025 at Indiana University in August 2025.
- 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
- 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 (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.
Research Foci
During the 2025-2026 academic year, the focus is on:
- Quantum AI and NLP
- Substance Abuse Knowledge and AI Systems: NIDA Drug Ontology, and substance abuse and slang in social media project
- Ontology Learning: Learning higher level semantic properties from raw text and images
- Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Ontologies, and Knowledge Graphs for Agentive AI: 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.
Team
| Muhammad S. Abdo | Khurrum Ali |
| Jose P. Benavides | Dr. Damir Cavar |
| Yanin Charoenpornsawat | Soren DeHaan |
| Aishwarya Balasaheb Dhaigude | Tribhangin Dichpally |
| Madhumitha Gannavaram | Arnav Jain |
| Ayomide Jeje | Ronit Jha |
| Sachin Kumar | Sam Gray Miller |
| Arun Munagala | Shruthi Nagappan |
| Avaanika Nair | Anuj Prakash |
| Naishal Shah | Shane A. Sparks |
| Amy C. Stafford | Pete William Sullivan |
| Dr. Zoran Tiganj | Dr. Danny Valdez |
| Ye-Ye Xu |
Former Team Members
Here is our Event Calendar with all meeting times.