About us

The LIIR lab of the Department of Computer Science at KU Leuven studies and develops machine learning models for processing unstructured language and multimedia data. Special interest goes to multimodal representation learning with focus on grounding language into the physical and social world. Our current research projects focus on representation learning in the context of natural language understanding (e.g., ERC Advanced Grant CALCULUS), on information extraction from biomedical text and its translation to knowledge (e.g., the Horizon Europe project AIDAVA) and on explainable AI including argumentation generation (e.g., CHIST-ERA projects ANTIDOTE and iTRUST).

Welcome to the home page of the LIIR lab of the Department of Computer Science of KU Leuven. The members of the lab are especially interested in machine learning, natural language understanding and generation, and multimedia mining. We study well-informed theoretical machine learning models as well as challenging applications, often empowered by big data sets. We study, design and implement probabilistic graphical and deep learning models, with a special focus on learning with limited supervision and on models inspired by biological brains. The developed technologies are, among others, applied in the domains of bioinformatics, medicine, robot navigation, business intelligence, e-commerce analytics, news search and mining, user generated content mining, and World Wide Web mining and search, and contribute to the field of data science in these areas.

The lab is a member of the Leuven.AI - KU Leuven Institute for Artificial Intelligence , of DigiSoc - KU Leuven Digital Society Institute, and of HERKUL - KU Leuven Institute for Cultural Heritage , and the Leuven Brain Institute (LBI). Together with our colleagues at ESAT/PSI and DTAI of KU Leuven we are a member of the KU Leuven ELLIS Unit. The European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) promotes basic research in machine learning and modern AI, and involves the very best European academics while working together closely with basic researchers from the industry.

Our alumni have outstanding positions in academics and the industry.