Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

Definitions of Human Language Technology

marzo 14th, 2009 · No hay Comentarios

Here are some authoritative definitions of Human Language Technology (also known as Natural Language Processing).

The first one, found at the DFKI webpage, was given by computational linguist Hans Uszkoreit:

Language technology — sometimes also referred to as human language technology — comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics.

A publication by ex-director of the CNLP Dr. Elizabeth D. Liddy defines HLT as follows:

Natural Language Processing is a theoretically motivated range of computational techniques for analyzing and representing naturally occurring texts at one or more levels of linguistic analysis for the purpose of achieving human-like language processing for a range of tasks or applications.

Lastly, a leaflet about LT, from the Centre for Language Technology (Macquarie University) contains this much less technical, but easier to understand explanation:

Language Technology is all about getting computers to do useful things with human language, whether in spoken or written form. It’s a key technology that will drive advances in computing in the next decade. Imagine being able to talk to your car and have it respond intelligently, giving detailed advice on routes or summarising up to date news you just missed on the radio. Or, being able to speak or type queries to your Web search engine in ordinary language, just as you would ask a person, and have it return just the document you were looking for, perhaps in summarized form for easy reading, translated from another language and with the key points for your purposes highlighted. (…)

As we can see, HLT constitutes a key subject for the advances in computational research.

References:

  • What is Language Technology? (2009). In the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, by Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieved March 13, 2009.
  • Natural Language Processing (2001). In the Center for Natural Language Processing, by E.D. Liddy. Retrieved March 13, 2009.
  • What Is Language Technology? (2009). In the Centre for Language Technology. Retrieved March 13, 2009.
  • Language Technology (2002). In the Centre for Language Technology, by the Department of Computing at the Macquarie University. Retrieved March 13, 2009.

Etiquetas:

  • Etiquetas