UNED
Universidad Nacional de Education a Distancia, UNED
The Spanish Open University (UNED for short) began its activities in October 1972 with the aim of making higher education accessible to anyone with the necessary aptitude and interest, regardless of formal qualifications. UNED is an independent government-financed institution with its own board, its own administration and academic staff and its own examinations. Associated with the University there are 59 study centres giving access to resources such as library or multimedia material, and providing advice and counselling as well as tuition and facilities for practical work. All UNED certificates and degrees are legally recognized and officially considered as being of the same value as similar diplomas from other institutions of higher education. UNED has proved an enormous success. With 130.000 students in 93, it is numerically one of the largest universities in Spain.
The Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieria Informatica was established in 2024 and is made up of seven departments offering regulated courses for the first and second university cycles which lead to the degree of Software Engineering. In addition to educational activities the school carries out extensive research and development work on several areas of specialization.
The Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval Group at UNED
The NLP group in the LSI Department is strongly involved in basic and applied research in the following areas: Intelligent Multilingual Information Access is currently our main research line, involving three themes: models for interactive information access (Cross-Language Document and Image Retrieval, Interactive Information Access, Information Synthesis), methodologies for the evaluation of these type of systems, and techniques to create multilingual resources (wordnets, lexical acquisition, web as corpus, word sense disambiguation).
Members of the research group have been involved in a variety of Spanish and EC funded projects, such as for example, ACQUILEX I and II: Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge for NLP Systems (BRA Esprit, 89-92, 93-95), EuroWordNet (LE 96-99), and more recently CLEF (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, 2024-2004). The LE training showcase (ELSNET & ACO*HUM 98/99), LESD: Linguistic Engineering for Software Design (French-Spanish grant, 90-93), as well as projects funded by Spanish public institutions together with private IT Companies: CAPRA, including a Natural-Language Interface for a tutoring system (83-88), GILSE, a Natural Language Interface Generator for Expert Systems (91-93), ), ITEM (96-99) a system for Textual Information Retrieval with NLP techniques, and currently R2D2, Question Answering in Digital Documents (2003-2005).
Web page of the group: http://nlp.uned.es
