Park Young-jun and Park Chan-min win the Grand Prize at the Naver Natural Language Processing Challenge

▲ (From left) Park Young-jun and Park Chan-min

A Sogang University team formed by Park Young-jun and Park Chan-min (master's students, Department of Computer Science & Engineering; supervisor: Professor Seo Jung-yun) of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory entered the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Challenge hosted by Naver and won the Grand Prize. The competition was the first held by Naver to invigorate natural language processing research in Korea, and was run as an open contest.

The Sogang University team of Park Young-jun and Park Chan-min won the Grand Prize in the SRL (Semantic Role Labeling) category. They also received an Encouragement Award in the NER (Named Entity Recognition) category.

Research in natural language processing — a major area of artificial intelligence, the core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — concerns how well machines can understand human language. The SRL and NER categories contested here are among the most central technologies in the field.

Professor Seo Jung-yun, who leads the Natural Language Processing Laboratory, said: "I am pleased that winning the Grand Prize at this competition seems to have demonstrated our university's competitiveness in artificial intelligence."