Currently, the focus in the lab is on three applications.  The first, known as clustering, is a way of automatically finding and organizing structure in large document collections.  This technology will allow a user with thousands of email documents to automatically arrange related documents into specific categories, facilitating easier browsing, searching, and organizing.

Spoken Language ID allows computers to understand spoken language.  Computers could recognize, for example, language spoken in phone calls, resulting in, among other things, quicker routing of 911 calls to language-specific operators.  This research also has major implications on national security issues.

Finally, the Smart News Reader tracks the user's consumption of news articles, suggests other news sources to augment what is already being read, and recommends when users should unsubscribe from less valuable sources. 

In the works is another project called the Syriac Concordance which will provide better access to early Christian texts in the Syriac language, a dialect of Aramaic.  Applying Natural Language Processing techniques to these early texts will produce tools to help scholars understand the development of the early Christian church.