BPO company Ubase Group said on Jan. 29 it signed an industry-academic cooperation agreement with Seoul National University\'s Natural Language Processing Lab and will pursue joint research to advance AI counselling. Ubase said it decided on the collaboration after judging that a linguistic approach to Korean is needed for natural AI counselling. Its AI Application Research Institute, created in December, will take part. The partners plan to secure technology to accurately recognise and process spoken dialogue and to build evaluation metrics reflecting Korean language characteristics such as omission and honorifics.