About Us

The Faculty

The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics (in Czech: Matematicko-fyzikální fakulta, MFF) is the leading Computer Science faculty in the Czech Republic. The faculty has competitive results worldwide, a fact which is acknowledged by many university rankings as well as by our results in international competitions (such as our faculty's victory in the 1998 ACM Programming Contest World Finals).

The Institute

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (in Czech: Ústav formální a aplikované lingvistiky, ÚFAL) builds upon the results of the computer science faculty and the tradition of the Prague linguistic school, which has been an influential factor in linguistics since 1930's.

We cooperate closely with many research centers around the world, taking part in international research projects. Notable past and current research projects include (with academic partners listed):

• Euromatrix – Statistical and Hybrid Machine Translation between All European Languages (with The University of Edinburgh and Saarland University)
• Companions – intelligent, persistent, personalized multimodal interfaces to the Internet (with The University of Sheffield, The University of Oxford, The University of Teesside, The Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Napier University, University of Tampere, University of West Bohemia and The University of Washington, University at Albany (State University of New York))
• LT4eL – Language Technology for eLearning (with Utrecht University, University of Lisbon, Polish Academy of Sciences, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Open University and Al.I.Cuza University of Iasi)
• MALACH – Multilingual Access to Large Spoken Archives (with University of Southern California, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland and University of Western Bohemia)

We are also participating in several educational projects including:

• The Vilem Mathesius Centre – Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics
• PIRE – Partnerships for International Research and Education (with Saarland University, The Johns Hopkins University and Brown University)
• CLARA – Common Language Resources and their Applications a Marie Curie Initial Training Network
• LATER – Language Technology Erasmus Mundus Program (with Saarland University, University of Malta and Copenhagen Business School)

Last but not least our institute focus on number of important local projects:

• Prague Dependency Treebanks – Czech dependency treebank, academic corpus, arabic treebank, Czech-English parallel treebank
• Tectogrammatical Representation – meaning representation, lexical semantics, valency
• Machine Translation between Related Languages – Česílko (demo) (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Lower Sorbian, Slovene, Russian)
• Tools for NLP (demo) – morphology (analysis, tagging), parsing (surface, tectogrammar), tree editors, ...

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics has hosted many important international research events including the following:

• ACL 2007 – The 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the most significant conference in computational linguistics
• TLT 2006 – The 5th International Treebanks and Linguistic Theories Conference
• CIL 2003 – XVII International Congress of Linguists
• ELSNET 2001 – The 9th ELSNET European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication (dedicated to text and speech corpora)
• ESSLLI 1996 – The 8th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information