From the different topics that are being developed in major sites on Human Language technology, machine translation and spell checking have called my attention and will, therefore, be described in detail in this article.
With regard to the first one, the idea of creating it dates back to to the 17th century when René Descartes proposed a universal language, where ideas in different tongues would share a symbol. The main purpose of this sub-field of the computational linguistics, as the name mentions, is to translate text or speech from one natural language into another. Taking this into account, the process followed in order to obtain the translation is divided into two different steps. First and foremost, the meaning of the source text is decoded and secondly, the meaning is re-encoded in the target language.
With regard to the second one, they were first created in the 1970s by the IBM corporation and a group of six linguistics. Spell checkers, what at first were known as ”verifiers” and later as “correctors”, are some application programmes which have as a function to signal the words which may not be spelled correctly. As a consequence, they may be used alone with texts or as a part of a larger application; word processor, dictionary o e-mail to name but a few ones.
References:
-
Machine translation. (2009, March 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:17, March 24, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Machine_translation&oldid=277284040
-
Spell checker. (2009, February 21). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:42, March 24, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spell_checker&oldid=272271888
-
Human Language Technologies (HLT). From Language Technology World. Retrieved 18th March, 2009 11.31 from http://www.lt-world.org/
-
Springer Netherlands (1997). Machine Translation. ISSN: 0922-6567 (Print) 1573-0573 (Online). Retrieved 24th March, 2009 15.31 from http://www.springerlink.com/content/k65n2805p422×2j0/fulltext.pdf?page=1
