▲ (From left) Park Young-jun, Professor Seo Jung-yun, Jung Young-hoon, Park Seo-jun, an official of the Korean Language Information Processing System Competition, Han Jang-hoon, Lee In-kwon and Han Jung-wook

Students of the Natural Language Processing Laboratory in Sogang University's Department of Computer Science & Engineering (supervisor: Professor Seo Jung-yun) — Han Jang-hoon, Park Young-jun and Jung Young-hoon (master's students) and Lee In-kwon, Han Jung-wook and Park Seo-jun (undergraduates) — won the Grand Prize, the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Prize, at the 2019 Korean Language Information Processing System Competition.

The competition, hosted by the National Institute of Korean Language, was held at KAIST in Daejeon on the 11th. Owing to the recent AI boom, competition was fierce, with entries from research institutes and companies as well as universities nationwide.

Sogang University's Natural Language Processing Laboratory received the highest marks for both performance and applicability for a Korean dependency parser that understands sentence structure by automatically identifying the relationships between sentence constituents.

With this, Sogang University's Natural Language Processing Laboratory — which has entered the competition every year since 2014 and won an award every time, including three Grand Prizes — has been recognized as holding the finest technology in Korea in Korean language information processing.

Professor Seo Jung-yun, who supervises the laboratory, said on receiving the award: "In our laboratory we use this competition as introductory training for newly admitted master's students and undergraduates interested in natural language processing. Our students are outstanding and are achieving better results than doctoral students and full-time researchers at other universities, which makes me very proud."