The RALI laboratory (Recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique – Applied research in computational liguistics) is a research unit at the Université de Montréal that includes computer scientists and linguists with considerable experience in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This field belonging to artificial intelligence focuses on the application of computer science principles and techniques to all aspects of human languages.

Since 2013, part of the research efforts carried out by Philippe Langlais and his team at RALI have focused on Open Information Extraction (OIE). The aim of this research area is to extract structured knowledge from unstructured, free text.

One of RALI's main research interests is information retrieval, which attempts to address an information need (i.e. What are the side-effects of a given drug?) based on the information contained in a collection of documents.

The Environmental Information Dissemination project, funded since 2008 by contributions from Environnement Canada, among others, explores new ways of customizing and translating the bulk of daily information produced by Environment Canada, for instance its weather warnings. Many prototypes have been developed for this project.

The laboratory also carries out research in the field of e-recruitment. For the BPP project, RALI and its industrial partner LittleBigJob Networks Inc. have been developing a platform to improve the process of recruiting managers and high level technicians by exploiting Big Data, extracted in part from social media.

RALI also carries out research in the fields of machine translation, automatic summarization, legal text processing, as well as on big data processing and visualisation, in collaboration with the government and industrial partners.