Situated in the heart of Western Europe, KU Leuven has been a centre of learning for almost six centuries. Founded in 1425 by Pope Martin V, KU Leuven bears the dual honour of being the oldest extant Catholic university in the world and the oldest university in the Low Countries. KU Leuven’s course offerings consist of 55 Bachelor’s programmes, 132 initial Master’s programmes and 48 advanced Master’s programmes. As a comprehensive university, these programmes span almost all fields of study. Near 1.000 staff and more than 40.000 students were enrolled at KU Leuven the last year.
Scientific research is the backbone of a forward-looking, dynamic university. It is a university’s raison d’être in today’s knowledge society and the foundation for high-quality education and social engagement. KU Leuven provides a stimulating home for all types of research, from fundamental to applied, and from individual projects to large-scale, international research consortia. The university of Leuven (KU Leuven) is the largest Flemish university in terms of publications. It is involved in the highest number of FP7 projects of all Belgian partners over all FP7 calls up to this moment.
The research unit that will carry out the work on the proposed project at the University of Leuven is the Centre for Computational Linguistics (KU Leuven). Its main objective is to contribute to basic research in formal and computational linguistics, and to the application of this research in natural language processing. KU Leuven builds on the expertise acquired during the eighties within the framework of various NLP projects. KU Leuven has been involved in many European and national projects in the fields of machine translation (Eurotra, Siemens-Metal, METIS-I, METIS-II, PaCo-MT, Picto) and other branches of computational linguistics. It is also the coordinator of CLARIN-VL. CLARIN is an ESFRI project.
KU Leuven is a member of the research community Computational Linguistics In Flanders and of the European Language and Speech network ELSNET.
Previous projects in the same field
European projects
- METIS I Machine Translation Dutch-English (hybrid system), STREP – FP6
- METIS II Machine Translation Dutch-English (hybrid system), STREP – FP6
- Eurotra: EU project with two aims: (1) to develop a prototype for machine translation between the languages of the European Community (Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish); (2) to stimulate research in computational linguistics in the EC Member States.
Bi-national project (Dutch STEVIN programme)
- PaCo_MT: Parse and Corpus-based Machine Translation.
National projects:
- WAI-NOT: promotes the use of ICT for people with intellectual disabilities. WAI-NOT supports e-inclusion by offering the website www.wai-not.be for youngsters and the website for teachers, parents, tutors or coachers.
- PICTo: Automatic translation between pictogram languages and Dutch, funded by Steunfonds M.M. Delacroix