HLTRI was established at UT Dallas in February 2002. It serves both the government and private industry as consumers of human language technology. In the institute, professors, researchers and students collaborate in envisioning new solutions for human language technology.

The goal of this institute is to incorporate activities in a broad spectrum of disciplines such as natural language processing, speech recognition and synthesis, knowledge acquired from texts and information extraction. These activities enable computers to interact with humans using natural language capabilities, and to serve as useful assistants to humans by providing services such as automatic text understanding and retrieval, information extraction and question answering, automatic translation and speech recognition.