About
cental | Louvain-la-Neuve
The Centre for Natural Language Processing (CENTAL) is both a technology platform and a research laboratory, bringing together numerous researchers who specialise in the computational processing of textual data. Its expertise is put to use in research, service to society and teaching.
Natural language processing (NLP)
Natural language processing (NLP), and text mining in particular, has become an integral part of our daily lives. Sitting at the crossroads of linguistics and computer science, this discipline belongs to the field of artificial intelligence. It aims to develop a set of techniques, based on algorithms, statistical models and linguistic resources, that automate language-related tasks, whether generating or interpreting language.
History
CENTAL is a research unit founded in 2001 on the foundations of a centre created in the late 1960s. That centre, CETEDOC (Centre de traitement électronique des documents / Centre for Electronic Document Processing), specialised at the time in building Latin databases and data banks. Today, CENTAL has broadened its field of investigation to include language engineering and natural language processing applied to modern languages.