Josef van Genabith's research centers on Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL). He is currently Director of the National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) at Dublin City University.

In his research, Prof. van Genabith is particularly interested in the automatic development of wide-coverage, robust, probabilistic unification grammars based on treebank resources; formal, logic-based, computational semantics; machine translation and the application of NLP technology in Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) software.

Traditionally, unification grammars are hand-coded. This is extremely time consuming, expensive and very difficult to scale. Prof. van Genabith, together with three research students, has developed a new method for automatically extracting wide-coverage probabilistic unification (LFG) grammars from treebank resources. He and his group have applied this methodology also to German (Tiger treebank) and are planning to migrate it to other more diverse languages.

Together with Dr. Any Way, Prof. van Genabith and two research students are currently working on a project to trick existing, wide-coverage, commercially available Machine Translation (MT) systems into producing better translations. The project uses existing technology and tries to "spoon-feed" MT systems to achieve improved translations.

In the area of computational semantics, Prof. van Genabith and his colleagues are currently working on automatically associating the Penn-II treebank with simple (Quasi-) Logical Forms based on their automatic f-structure annotation algorithm. In other work with a research student, they use wide-coverage probabilistic parsers to analyse questions for open-domain question answering applications. With Dr. John Kelleher of MIT MediaLab Europe, Prof. van Genabith is working on natural language interfaces to virtual reality systems and the grounding of language interpretation in a dynamically evolving visual and textual discourse context.

Together with colleague Ms. Monica Ward and a number of research students, Prof. van Genabith is also working on the integration of "low-level" and "high-level" NLP technology in CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) applications in primary, secondary and third level education, as well as remedial education scenarios.