Microsoft Research: Advancing Human Language Technologies

Human Language Technologies at Microsoft Research

This document outlines the research areas and featured content within Microsoft's Human Language Technologies group. The focus is on developing software and systems that facilitate natural communication between humans and machines, bridging linguistic divides.

Research Areas:

Microsoft Research is organized into several key domains, with Human Language Technologies falling under the broader umbrella of Intelligence.

• Intelligence:

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • Audio & Acoustics
  • Computer Vision
  • Graphics & Multimedia
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Human Language Technologies
  • Information Retrieval & Search

• Systems:

  • Data Platforms & Analytics
  • Hardware & Devices
  • Programming Languages & Software Engineering
  • Quantum Computing
  • Security, Privacy & Cryptography
  • Systems & Networking

• Theory:

  • Algorithms
  • Mathematics

• Other Sciences:

  • Ecology & Environment
  • Economics
  • Medical, Health & Genomics
  • Social Sciences
  • Technology for Emerging Markets

Featured Content:

The page highlights recent research, publications, events, and career opportunities related to Human Language Technologies.

Recent Highlights:

• Advancing Sustainable Agricultural Practices in Africa with AI (Event)

  • Next: November 4, 2025 – November 8, 2025 | Cairo, Egypt
  • A half-day workshop at AfriCHI 2025 inviting researchers, practitioners, NGOs, and academics to discuss AI's role in African agriculture.

• TableLoRA: Low-rank Adaptation on Table Structure Understanding for Large Language Models (Publication)

  • Authors: Xinyi He, Yihao Liu, Mengyu Zhou, Yeye He, Haoyu Dong, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
  • Published in: The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL ’25) | July 2025
  • Related Project: Spreadsheet Intelligence

• MMInference: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context VLMs via Modality-Aware Permutation Sparse Attention (Publication)

  • Authors: Yucheng Li, Huiqiang Jiang, Chengruidong Zhang, Qianhui Wu, Xufang Luo, Surin Ahn, Amir H. Abdi, Dongsheng Li, Jianfeng Gao, Yuqing Yang, Lili Qiu
  • Published in: ICML 2025 | July 2025
  • Related: Github repository for MInference, Project MInference.

Career Opportunities:

• Researcher Intern

  • Posted: July 11, 2025
  • Locations: Mountain View, CA, US; Redmond, WA, US
  • Research Areas: Algorithms, Artificial intelligence, Computer vision, Data platforms and analytics, Human language technologies
  • Focus: Conducting research and leading collaborations to advance computer science and engineering.

• Senior Applied Scientist – Word

  • Posted: July 11, 2025
  • Locations: Redmond, WA, US; Remote (within US)
  • Research Areas: Artificial intelligence, Human language technologies
  • Focus: Building large-scale natural language understanding and generation models.

• Senior Researcher

  • Posted: July 8, 2025
  • Locations: Redmond, WA, US; United States
  • Research Areas: Algorithms, Artificial intelligence, Computer vision, Data platforms and analytics, Human language technologies
  • Focus: Conducting research and leading collaborations to advance state-of-the-art computer science.

• Senior Applied Research Scientist, Generative AI & Agentic Systems – Dynamics 365

  • Posted: June 25, 2025
  • Location: Seattle, WA, US
  • Research Areas: Artificial intelligence, Data platforms and analytics, Human language technologies, Human-computer interaction
  • Focus: Leading research and development of next-generation generative AI for customer experience.

Tools and Downloads:

• ExACT

  • An approach for teaching AI agents to explore more effectively.
  • Available for download and related publication.

• Lost in Conversation

  • A code repository for benchmarking LLMs on multi-turn task completion.
  • Available on GitHub with an accompanying publication.

Filtering and Sorting:

The page allows users to filter results by:

• Content Types: Publications, Videos, Tools, Blog posts, Projects, Events, Groups, Career Opportunities.
• People: Researchers and their publication counts.
• Labs: Microsoft Research labs (e.g., Redmond, India, Cambridge, Montreal).
• Date of Publication: All dates, last week, last month, last year, custom range.

Results can be sorted by relevance, recency, or alphabetically.

Social Media and Engagement:

Links are provided to follow Microsoft Research on various social media platforms (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram) and to subscribe to their RSS feed. Sharing options for X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit are also available.

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