VCU Natural Language Processing Lab news . research . people . publications . teaching . software . data . lab . contact research interests . projects . past projects Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods: to investigate the properties of human language and model the cognitive mechanisms underlying the understanding and production of language to develop novel practical applications involving the intelligent processing of human language by computer research interests Our research interests are in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Information Retrieval. We are currently working on: Word sense Disambiguation Semantic Relatedness and Similarity Literature-based Discovery Biomedical and Clinical NLP Nanoinformatics current research projects Word Sense Disambiguation automatically determine the correcting meaning of ambiguous words Semantic Similarity and Relatedness quantify the degree in which two terms are related Association Measures quantify the degree in which two terms are associated previous research projects Collocation Identification identify multi-word collocations in text Spelling Correction correct context sensitive spelling errors Word Alignment align words and terms in parallel text Classification of ICD9CM Codes assign ICD9CM codes to radiology reports Multi-label Classification of Clinical Records multi-label classification of obesity and associated co-morbidities in discharge summaries