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/

 

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.

 

• Martin Kay. (2008, June 7). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:35, March 23, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Kay&oldid=217746063
• Martin Kay (2004, October 21). In Stanford Department of Linguistics, Retrieved 14:41, March 20, 2009, from: http://www-linguistics.stanford.edu/people/pages/kay.shtml

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.

 

  

 

• Gianni Lazzari (2006, may). Project TC-STAR – Technology and Corpora for Speech-to-Speech Translation. Project Manager: Gianni Lazzari – IST-2002-FP6-506738  Retrieved 12:30, March 16 from http://www.tc-star.org/pubblicazioni/D17_HLT_ENG.pdf
• Language technology. (2008, April 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:31, March 18, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_technology&oldid=202607020
• Human Language Technologies (HLT).  Meraka Institute, the African Advanced Institute for Information and Communication Technology. Retrieved 12:29, March 22, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm