Founded in 1988, DFKI today is one of the largest nonprofit contract research institutes in the field of innovative software technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods. DFKI is focusing on the complete cycle of innovation – from world-class basic research and technology development through leading-edge demonstrators and prototypes to product functions and commercialization. Based in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen, and Berlin, DFKI ranks among the important “Centers of Excellence” worldwide. An important element of DFKI’s mission is to move innovations as quickly as possible from the lab into the marketplace. Only by maintaining research projects at the forefront of science DFKI has the strength to meet its technology transfer goals. The research centre is set up as a public-private partnership, i.e., it is jointly owned by some of the largest German industrial corporations, two universities, three federal states and the Fraunhofer Society. DFKI benefits from interaction with the Informatics Faculties of the Universities of Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, and Bremen and in turn provides opportunities for research and PhD thesis supervision to students from these universities, which have an outstanding reputation in Computer Science and in Computational Linguistics. The Language Technology (LT) Lab of DFKI focuses on advanced IT applications dealing with human language. It is one of the few centres at which deep linguistic processing methods are combined with new computing paradigms, machine learning techniques and insights from cognitive science. The Lab has vast experience in modeling areas in such a way that they are highly amenable to machine learning and classification tasks. Applications centered around recognizing different types of documents have been successfully fielded.
