What are the Human Language Technologies? According to Hans Uszkoreit, Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University, Saarbrücken:
Language technologies are information technologies that are specialized for dealing with the most complex information medium in our world: human language. Therefore these technologies are also often subsumed under the term Human Language Technology.
Also, he adds that it “comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech.” It creates a formal representation that link language to concepts, for we don’t know how brain does it. Human comunication is normally spoken, or written -in reference to language-, but we also use images and sounds to comunicate.
What researchers want to achieve creating Language Technology systems is having a software with knowledge of human language. It should be really useful, even vital, to improve human-machine comunication, as it’s main problem is misunderstanding. Though, they also work on translators to make easier for two people with diferent mother languages to understand each other.
We will have to wait to see a truly successful software on Human language, but researchers are optimistic. On the meanwhile, they are working hard to make comunciation easier each passing day.
Sources:
- Hans Uszkoreit. (2009). In the Saarland University website. Retrieved 10:54, March 15, 2009, from http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/
- Language Technology. A First Overview. By Hans Uszkoreit. Retrieve 11:09, March 15, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/LT.pdf
- What is language technology? By Hans Uszkoreit. German Research Centre for Artificial Inteligence. Retrieve 11:34, March 15, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.ph
