The Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE) conducts high-risk, high-impact research and marshals the international research community to solve challenging problems in human language technology and adjacent areas of artificial intelligence. Our research focuses on advanced technology for automatically analyzing a wide range of speech, text, and document data in multiple languages and multimodal media, including vision and video.

Researchers at the HLTCOE anticipate emerging trends in human language technologies and proactively address real-world challenges such as those selected as topics of our annual summer workshop, SCALE. We have access to world-class compute capabilities among research institutions and enjoy considerable freedom to pursue our own research agenda within the center’s broad research areas. We publish widely at top-tier conferences such as ACL, SIGIR, EMNLP, ICLR, ICASSP, etc., and our work has often been recognized with best paper awards. We organize shared tasks and release public datasets to engage the international research community in new and exciting problem areas.

As part of the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, the HLTCOE collaborates with a broad network of groups working on speech, language, and artificial intelligence research. We frequently collaborate with members of the Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Applied Mathematics & Statistics departments, as well as the Center for Language and Speech Processing and the new Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Institute. Many HLTCOE researchers have primary and secondary appointments in, and advise graduate students from, other academic departments and centers. Adding to a well-established track record of research excellence in data science, machine learning, and AI, JHU’s transformational investment in these areas makes it a particularly exciting location for research at the intersection of AI and Human Language Technology.