INESC-ID’s HLT lab has been, for over two decades, a key player in many areas of Speech Processing, Natural Language Processing, and Computational Linguistics. The lab brings together a strongly multidisciplinary group of researchers, with the long-term goal of bridging the gap between natural spoken language and the underlying semantic information.

Research topics include speech recognition and synthesis, multimodal dialogue systems, natural language interfaces, speech and text analytics, summarisation, machine translation (including to Portuguese Sign Language), and more recently, biosignals that capture brain activity for human-machine interaction and mapping of cognitive information.

The lab has a long history of successful involvement in several areas with societal relevance, such as health, education, security, and entertainment.