Nowadays, computer scientists are concerned about many topics. However, there are some issues which are more discussed. Computational Semantics has a great importance and there have been done lots of projects in this field. But what does Computational Semantics mean? Well, first of all, it has to be said that to understand it you have to know terms like semantics, linguistics, natural language … Wikipedia defines it like this:
“Computational Semantics is the study of how to automate the process of constructing and reasoning with meaning representations of natural language expressions. It consequently plays an important role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.”
In other words, the aim of this multidisciplinary field is to find techniques to write automatically semantic representations for expressions of human language. Indeed, we will be able to perform inference thanks to these representations.
Another important research topic is Speaker Recognition, this happens when the computer tries to recognize who is speaking. Mainly, it uses the features of speech that everybody has different like anatomy (size of the mouth, shape of the throat…) and learned behavioural patterns (speaking style, voice pitch…). It is similar to Speech Recognition. Nevertheless, it has nothing to do with that. Speech Recognition is the fact of recognizing what is being said.
Finally, I would like to say that one particularly project sticks in my mind with regard to speaker recognition. The name of the project is Secure Access Front-End and scientists are trying to improve the services access security without increasing the service complexity.
References:
- Computational Semantics (2009, March, 9) In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 9:00, June, 19, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_semantics
- Computational Semantics Patrick Blackburn, Johan Bos. In The University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Retrieved: 10:15, June, 19, from http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/
- Speaker Recognition (2009, June, 12) In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved: 23:10, June, 19, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_recognition
- Projects (2009, June, 9) In Language Technology World. Retrieved: 23:20, June 19, from http://www.lt-world.org/
