Director: Annie K. Lamar
The Low-Resource Language Lab at UC Santa Barbara
The Low-Resource Language (LOREL) Lab at UC Santa Barbara is a computational linguistics lab dedicated to advancing research related to scarce, endangered, and ancient languages and connected cultural communities. We focus on developing new techniques and evaluation methods in data science and machine learning for linguistic datasets that are small, complex, or fragmented (“low-resource”).
The LOREL Lab is both a research and teaching lab. We prioritize research that connects faculty and students and offers opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students to gain hands-on experience with professional-level research, communication, and publication.
Our Research
Low-Resource Linguistics & NLP
We investigate how machine learning models perform under conditions of data scarcity, studying embedding stability, dataset design, model architectures, and evaluation challenges for under-resourced and endangered languages.
Data Science for Social Good
We use data science to address questions of equity, access, and social impact across a range of public-interest domains. Our recent work has focused on missing migrant data, examining how humanitarian information systems record (and fail to record) the experiences of displaced and vulnerable communities.
Computational Classics
We develop computational tools and methods for studying ancient Mediterranean literature, language, and culture. Students often collaborate on digital editions, datasets, spatial modeling projects, and code libraries.
Education & Pathways Research
We study pathways into humanities majors, especially for community-college transfer and nontraditional students, and explore how learners acquire computational skills in humanistic settings. This work informs teaching practices and curriculum design at UCSB and beyond.
Recent Lab Publications
Recent Highlights
Five undergraduates from the LOREL Lab presented at the 2025 Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research (SCCUR).
Seven of our undergraduates presented posters on their original research at UCSB’s Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities conference this past spring.
Three undergraduates representing five majors presented their original research on community college curricula at the 2025 MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC).
Cypris presented their work on semantic analysis of scholarship using word embeddings at the 2025 UCSB AI Symposium and won first place in the poster contest.
Annie K. Lamar 