Spell Checking (Q. Number 2)

When we are talking about computing, a spell checker (or spell check) is an application program that flags words in a document which may not be spelled in a correct way. However,  when a word which is not within the dictionary is encountered most spell checkers provide an option to add that word to a list of known exceptions that should not be flagged. Spell checkers may be stand – alone capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

 

Appart from that, there are other kind of checkers, such us grammar checkers.  These ones are supoosed to works as normal spell checkers. Those are, however, some negative points of them:

  • A grammar checker may miss important errors.
  • A grammar checker may accidentally suggest corrections that are inaccurate.
  • A grammar checker may flag grammatically correct text as incorrect.

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    There are many common grammar errors that computer software struggles to find. For example, one recent study comparing the effectiveness of common grammar checkers found that these programs will typically miss the following errors:

    • No comma after an introductory element in a sentence
    • Missing preposition
    • Comma splice
    • No comma in a compound sentence
    • Vague pronoun references
    • Tense shift
    • Incorrect use of the possessive apostrophe
    • Pronoun agreement error
    • Run-on sentence
    • Sentence fragment  

     

     

     

    Moreover, simple spell checkers operate on individual words by comparing each of them with the words which appear on the dictionary, possibly performing stemming on the word. If the word is not found, it is considered as an error, and an attempt may be made to suggest a word that was likely to have been intended.

    Add comment Junio 19, 2009

    List of topics (Q. Number 2)

    These are the topics I have chosen:

    1. Spell Checking
    2. Emotion recognition
    3. Morphological Analysis
    4. Natural Language Generation
    5. Summarisation 
    6. Categorisation
    7. Multimedia Retrieval 
    8. Language Checking 
    9. Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotions
    10. Multilingual Content for Flexible Format Internet Premium Services
    11. Disclosure of video material on the basis of sub-titles
    12. Test Suites for Natural Language Processing

     

    Add comment Junio 19, 2009

    Research centres for Human Language Technologies in Europe (Q. Number 1)

    There are three main research centres for Human Language Technologies in Europe. One of them is located in Dublin, Ireland. It conducts research into the processing of human language by computers, such as speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, human-computer interfaces, information retieval and extraction, the teaching and learning of languages using computers and software localisation and globalisation.

    The second outstanding research centre is in Germany and it’s called National Centre for Language Technology. Their main objective is to reach the improvement of language technology through novel computational techniques for processing text, speech and knowledge. They also want to be able to reach a deeper understanding of human language and thought, studying the true needs of the end user and the demands of the market.

    Finally, the third main research centre we can find is the Edinburgh Language Technology Group, which is in Scotland, UK. It’s a research and development group and it’s members have been working in the area of natural language engineering since 1990. This group was originally founded as part of the Human Communication Research Centre; actually, it’s based in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems of the Division of Informatics of thesity of Edinburgh, which is one of the largest communities of natural language processing specialists in Europe.

    They focus on building practical solutions to real problems in text processing. Furthermore, they have worked in all areas of large-volume text handling, from text annotation through markup architectures and from information extraction to automatic or computer – assisted generation of text.

     

    • National Centre for Language Technology.(2002, July 12). In Dublin City University. Retrieved 19:55, March 25, 2009, from http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/areas.html
    • German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (2008). Language Technology Lab (DFKI Germany). Retrieved 20:07, March 7, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/index.php
    • Edinburgh Language Technology Group (Scotland, UK). (2006, June 30). Retrieved 20:19 March 25, 2009, from http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/

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    Add comment Marzo 25, 2009

    Martyn Kay (Q. Number 1)

    Martyn Kay, who is a scientist specialiced in computers, is mainly known for his work in computational linguistics. He was born and grown in Great Britain and, in 1961 he was given his M.A. from Trinity College, Cambridge, However, in 1958 he started to work at the Cambridge Language Research Unit, which was one of the earliest centers for research in what is now known as Computational Linguistics. In 1961, he went to work to to the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he  became head of research in linguistics and machine translation in a very short period of time. He left Rand in 1972 to become Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. In 1974, he moved to the Xerox Palo Alto Researc Center as a Research Fellow. In 1985, while he was retaining his position at Xerox PARC, he joined the faculty of Stanford University half – time. Actually, he is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University and Honorary Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University.

    According to Stanford Department of Linguistics, Martyn  Kay was responsible for introducing the notion of chart parsing in computational linguistics, and the notion of unification in linguistics commonly. On the other hand, while he was working with Ron Kaplan, he was pioneer of finite-state morphology. He has been a longtime contributor to, and critic of, work on machine translation. Also, while he was Permanent Chairman of the International Committee on Computational Linguistics, Kay was a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center until 2002.

     

    Add comment Marzo 25, 2009

    Human Language Technologies (Q. Number 1)

    The world has been completely changed by computers, digitalization, and networks. It is very hard to teach computers to handle human speech and language –both spoken and written– in the different ways that people can be able to use it properly: to speak naturally, understand what has been said and meant, summarize a document or a conversation… So, we want to keep in touch with computers and machines using our language and voice. This all could be definited as Human Language Technology.
     
    Also according to the Wikipedia, Human Language Technologies (or Language Technology, which is the same) consists of a mix of computational linguistics and speech technology. This kind of language is closely linked to computer science and general linguistics.
    On the other hand, the Meraka Institute, the African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology, HLT makes it easier for people to interact with machines. This can be beneficious for a huge range of people, such as illiterate farmers in remote villages who want to obtain relevant medical information over a cellphone,or scientists in state-of-the-art laboratories who want to focus on problem-solving with computers.
     
      
     

    Add comment Marzo 23, 2009

    Web 1.0 & Web 2.0

    First of all let’s define these two concepts: On the one hand, according to Wikipedia, Web 1.0 is a retronym that refers to the state of the World Wide Web, and any website design style used before the advent of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is the general term which has been created to describe the Web before 2001, which is seen by a lot of people as a turning point for the internet.

    On the other hand we have got Web 2.0. Also according to the webpage Wikipedia, it is defined like a term which describes the changing trends in the use of WWW technology and web design that aim to enhance communications, creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web – culture communities and hosted services. We can appreciate the following examples social – networking sites, wikis and blogs, video sharing sites and folksonomies.

    Moreover, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. It is considered the border between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The term of Web 2.0 began with a conference brainstorming session between Tim O’Reilly and MediaLive International.

     

    1 comment Febrero 4, 2009

    RSS

    RSS is a format based on XML which permits us to find the best information for anybody who is looking for something on the Internet. It also offers us the possibility of finding that information on a quickier way.

    There are three kind of RSS formats:

  • Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91)
  • RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 y 1.0)
  • Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0)

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    However, according to Wikipedia, RSS is part of the family of Web feed formats, which are usually used to publish frequently updated works, for example: blog entries, news headlines, audio and video. They are updated in a standardized format.

    Moreover, there are some RSS documents; each of these documents can be also called “feed”, “web feed” or “channel”. They include full or summarized texts. Web feeds or RSS documents benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

     

    RSS solves problems for surfers who regularly use the web. It does allow us to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest updates from the sites we are interested in. With these format we don’t need to visit each site individually.

     

    References

     

    Add comment Enero 22, 2009

    Hypertext

    On the one hand and according to the Webpage http://www.w3.org/ and the scientist Ted Nelson, the meaning of  Hypertext (a concept, not a product) is a text which contains links and isn’t constrained to be clear. However, Wikipedia says that the Hypertext text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information on demand. Hypertext is a representation of  a relative recent innovation to user interfaces.

    On the other hand,Roland Barthes points out that the hypertext is an ideal text that precisely matches. As I said before, it consist on a text composed of an amount of words or images linked electronically. They are also perpetually unfinished.

    Hypertext is a text that branches and allows choices to the reader, such as the possibility of taking differet pathways to read the text the reader wants to. Hypertext also denotes a medium information, which links verbal and non – verbal information.

     

    1 comment Enero 14, 2009

    XML

    XML is an initialism of Estensible Markup Language. This is a general purpose specification for creating personalized markup languages. It’s clasified as extensible language; it allows everyone to define the mark – up elements. XML a simple and a very flexible text format which derives from SGML and it was originally designed to to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing. The objective is to help information systems in sharing and exchanging structured data, especially via the Internet, to encode documents, and to serialize data; in the last context, it compares serialization languages, which are based on texts, such as JSON and YAML.

    Extensible Markup Language is highly recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is a fee open standard. This recommendation tells us and specifies lexical grammar and parsing requirements.
    To conclude, we can say that XML began as a simple subset of the SGML.

    References

       

       

      Add comment Enero 14, 2009

      HTML

      According to Wikipedia, the meaning of HTML is HyperText Markup Language. It is the predominant markup language of Web pages.  It provides a means to describe the structure of text – based information in a document (by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on) and to supplement that text with interactive forms, images, and a large number of different kinds of objects. HTML is written in the form of tags, surrounded by angle brackets. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can include embedded scripting language code, for exmple, JavaScript, which can affect the behavior of Web browsers and other HTML processors.

      The HTML is one of the most well-known examples of a markup language in the use of nowadays. The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is also one of the most used language in the World Wide Web. HTML follows some of the markup conventions used in the industry of publicity in the communication of essays and work which are printed among authors, editors, and printers.

      Another definition of HTML, in these case according to the webpage W3C, is that HTML is called lingua franca for publishing hypertext on the WWW. It is a non – proprietary format based upon SGML, and it can be created and processed by a wide range of tools, from simple plain text writers and printers.

       

      1 comment Enero 14, 2009

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