The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is a dedicated research department within the University of Brighton. The current focus of the Institute's work is on computational linguistics, language engineering, and human computer interfaces. Our research addresses the following theoretical issues: architectures for natural language generation, constraint based reasoning, controlled languages, corpora, diagrammatic reasoning, dialog, discourse, integrating text and graphics, lexical knowledge bases, lexical representation, message understanding, multilinguality, natural language interfaces, text generation, underspecification, word sense disambiguation. The work of the Institute is funded primarily by grants from national and European research councils and contracts with commercial organisations. Much of our work is on highly theoretical issues, but the Institute is also strongly committed to strategic research, ensuring whenever possible that the results of our research can provide solutions to real-world problems.
The Institute is comprised of around twenty staff and students: professors, readers, research fellows, research assistants, postgraduate students and technical and administrative staff. We also regularly host visiting researchers from other universities worldwide. Collaboration is a key characteristic of the work of the Institute: between researchers from a number of the University's faculties, with research groups at other universities and research institutes (nationally and internationally) and with industry. Several of our current research projects are joint with other Universities (eg, University of Amsterdam, University of Edinburgh, Charles University Prague). The Institute also hosts visiting researchers for periods up to three years; recent visitors have come from Carnegie Mellon University, the Information Sciences Institute in the United States, the universities of Musashi and Waseda in Japan, the University of Sofia in Bulgaria, the University of São Paulo and the Catholic University in Brazil, and Columbia and Harvard Universities in the USA.
We accept postgraduate research students, typically with an MSc or equivalent experience, to study to both the MPhil and PhD level. With its interdisciplinary emphasis and its staff of international researchers, the Institute provides an excellent environment for research students. Our research staff are committed to providing high quality supervision, training students to become fully-fledged researchers and members of the larger intellectual community. Although PhD research is an independent endeavour, our on-going research programmes provide postgraduates students at the Institute with excellent opportunities to associate their work with our larger projects, working side by side with experienced researchers. Our weekly seminar series and programme of visiting researchers introduce our students to a wide range of perspectives and give them the chance to meet and discuss their work with internationally known researchers.