NLP Lab
The Natural Language Processing Lab and Quantum AI Study Group
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. Ultimately, we believe we are getting closer to what Steve Jobs had as a vision in 1985.
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.
There are two independent group meetings: the NLP-Lab discussing general NLP and AI topics, and the Quantum AI and NLP Study Group. In addition, we organize occational talks related to Quantum AI and NLP.
NLP-Lab Meetings: During the Spring of 2026, we meet in person every week in Luddy Hall (BLIF) 0002, every Wednesday from 5:30 to 7:00 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 5:30 to 7:00 PM.
The Quantum AI and NLP Study Group Talks are typically scheduled for Fridays at 4 PM in Luddy Hall (BLIF) 0002 or online.
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 Spring of 2026 meetings:
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| 01/01-13/2026 | Break |
| 01/14/2026 | Regular meeting: NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project |
| 01/21/2026 | Regular meeting: NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project |
| 01/28/2026 | Regular meeting: NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project |
| 02/04/2026 | Regular meeting: paper submission preparation and meeting, Dove Recovery House project, Alzheimer’s and Cancer KGs and Agentive models |
| 02/11/2026 | Regular meeting: paper submission preparation and meeting, Dove Recovery House project, Alzheimer’s and Cancer KGs and Agentive models |
| 02/18/2026 | Regular meeting: Dove Recovery House project, NIDA Drugs AI and Ontology project |
| … |
Previous Meeting Schedules
News
- Quantum AI and NLP Conference 2026 (still old website, it will be updated soon) will be August 14th - 16th on the IUI campus in Indianapolis! Stay tuned for updates!
- The Complex Bidirectional Integration 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, usable as a state-of-the-art text diffusion model, as a BERT-style bidirectional encoder-only model, etc. - 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 (LLM), 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
Former Team Members
Here is our Event Calendar with all meeting times.