The LTI advances the science and engineering of language in all its forms within real-world, contextual environments. Our mission is to cultivate world-class talent who conduct pioneering research to innovate trustworthy, inclusive, and ethically aligned AI systems that enable, enhance, and empower effective human communication across cultures, modalities, and domains. Through bold innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, we aim to revolutionize how people connect, learn, and make decisions—shaping a future where language technologies are a force for equity, understanding, and global impact.

Mission Pillars

1. Talent Development
   Nurture and empower the next generation of scientists, engineers, and changemakers in language technologies through interdisciplinary education, mentorship, and a culture of scientific excellence.
   
2. Trustworthy and Ethical AI
   Lead the development of trustworthy language technologies that are fair, transparent, robust, ethical, and aligned with human values, emphasizing explainability, safety, cultural sensitivity, and governance.
   
3. Language in All Its Forms
   Advance the science and engineering of language in its full richness—including text, speech, sign language, gesture, and embodied communication—grounded in context and interaction with real-world environments across modalities.
   
4. Disruptive Innovation
   Pioneer breakthrough models and systems that challenge traditional paradigms and expand what is possible in human-AI communication, while embedding trust, accountability, and societal alignment into every innovation.
   
5. Global and Multilingual Inclusion
   Champion language equity by developing inclusive, multilingual, and culturally adaptive AI that respects and represents the full diversity of human expression and experience.
   
6. Societal Impact
   Apply transformative language technologies to critical sectors—healthcare, education, policy, media, and beyond—while engaging stakeholders to ensure their ethical, sustainable, and context-aware deployment.

What are Language Technologies?

We view language as a set of multi-modal channels for generating, expressing, and understanding meaning. Although we began as an institute dedicated to the study of machine translation, today we define language in broader terms: from spoken words to gestures and facial expressions, from information captured in video and audio clips to the language of big data, markets and the cells in our bodies. Our researchers come from a broad spectrum of backgrounds and work in a variety of fields tied together by our foundational mission, including:

• Natural Language Processing
• Computational Linguistics
• Information Extraction and Summarization
• Information Retrieval
• Question Answering
• Text Mining and Analytics
• Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Acquisition
• Language Technologies for Education
• Machine Learning
• Machine Translation
• Multimodal Computing and Interaction
• Speech Processing
• Spoken Interfaces and Dialogue Processing

The LTI Principles

TREEE: TRustworthy, Ethical, Equitable, and Empowering

• TRustworthy: Emphasis on safe, aligned, explainable systems.
  
• Ethical: Grounds the work in human-centered design.
  
• Equitable: Ensures global, linguistic, and cultural inclusion.
  
• Empowering: Reflects LTI’s mission of enabling effective communication at scale.