The Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory (CLIC) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in studying verbal and non-verbal communication. Research in the laboratory uses both computational and cognitive methods. At present the laboratory is focused on the following areas of research:
- The study of the use of semantic and encyclopedic knowledge in communication. We try to connect work of theoretical nature in linguistics and computer science (formal linguistics, lexical semantics, ontological modeling) with empirical data-intensive approaches based on statistics and text mining (lexical acquisition from textual data and multimodal sources) as well as with behavioral and neuroscientific evidence on conceptual representation in the mind/brain;
- The study of classic questions in theoretical linguistics and in particular semantics (such as compositionality) with computational and experimental methods;
- The study of multimodal communication, in which agents communicate using (and keeping in mind what is expressed with) a variety of expressive means that go from verbal expressions to gestures as well as in the direction of a look, and that can also use images and diagrams. Both the cognitive/linguistic aspects of this type of communication as well as the possible technological applications are studied in various types of interfaces;
- The extraction and integration of semantic information from different multimodal sources, in particular language and vision;
- The study of adaptive interfaces: systems that can adapt to their users, communicating amongst themselves in different ways, depending on their preferences.