Which natural language processing lab should I join?

[h56cho]

Hello,
I am a PhD student and I already have a specific research questions in mind which I will use for my dissertation. While in my field (Natural Language Processing or NLP) research collaboration is very important even for PhD students, it is difficult to find people to collaborate with from my own department (and my supervisor is not an expert in the field)

So I am looking into collaborating with people from a NLP lab who is actively engaged in my field. There are 2 research labs at my university which I am interested in working with.

The first NLP lab is very active and their research output is very impressive, but their general research subarea is not a great match to the type of research questions that I have in mind. A part of my fear is that if I join this research group, I will have to abandon some of my research ideas and start from the scratch again.

The second research group is related to NLP but they work in the intersection of NLP, information retrieval, and databases, so they have broader focus than just on NLP. However one of the PhD students in that research group is doing a research that is closely aligned with my research interest. I believe that if I join this group, I can collarborate with that particular PhD student.

Which research group would you say that I should join?

 

Thank you,

 

[lemon-cmd]

The second. But you should reach out to both in my opinion. I heard you can be a member of multiple labs.

 

Good luck