The Ontological Semantic Technology Laboratory (OSTL) is a multidisciplinary research facility at Texas A&M University in Commerce, TX. The facility advances ontology-based research, in particular natural language processing (NLP), through development and implementation of NLP software and engages in academic and market research by harnessing the available industry expertise on campus in collaboration with off-campus colleagues.

The focus of the OST lab is semantic processing of unstructured real-world natural language text in computer networks, the largest repository of knowledge and information in the world. The OSTL provides direct access to text meaning using ‘human-like’ processing rather than statistical approximations with probabilistic “mining,” “extraction,” or “annotation” algorithms as is available commercially in the marketplace today.

Knowledge-based NLP as developed by the OSTL is research that most advances the field of accurate text processing and is highly valued by commercial implementations and academic calls for proposals in NLP and other knowledge-rich applications.

Importantly, the lab also supports trans- and multidisciplinary research involving ontologies complementary to statistical approaches and in non-NLP functions.