History

Macquarie's Centre for Language Technology was instituted within the University's Division of Information and Communication Sciences (now the Faculty of Science) in 2001; but we have a strong history of activity that goes back to 1994. Over the intervening years we have developed a comprehensive infrastructure that supports research and teaching in the area: we have an extensive collection of state-of-the-art software for language processing, a comprehensive library of materials in the field, an active and constructive research culture that is oriented towards excellence. See some recent topics covered in our weekly group meetings.

The Centre for Language Technology began in 1994 as a research unit within what was then called the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Software Technology, hosted by Microsoft Australia. At that time the group was known as the Natural Language Processing Unit.

In 1996 the group moved to Macquarie University, and became the Language Technology Group within the Microsoft Research Institute, a research laboratory funded by Microsoft under the Australian Government's Partnership for Development (PfD) Program.

In 2000, the group received significant funding from the Australian Government's prestigious Science Lectureships Initiative for a proposal to create an undergraduate program in Language Technology.