The Human Language Technologies (HLT), also known as Language Technologies or Natural Language Processing (NLP), are closely connected to computer science and linguistics. HLT enables people to interact with machines with more ease. We find an example of how HLT can help people: “This can benefit a wide range of people – from illiterate farmers in remote villages who want to obtain relevant medical information over a cellphone, to scientists in state-of-the-art laboratories who want to focus on problem-solving with computers.”
As Hans Uszkoreit wrote in one of his publications, there is a problem in the interaction between human and machine, for there is a communication problem. Machines’ language and human language is not the same since machine’s domain of language is very restricted. But with NLP, the data used by computers becomes readable for human; it designs mechanisms of communication which work with programs that simulate the communication.
But, although there have been many advantages in this field, we still can find some difficulties when we communicate with a computer. When we enter a sentence, it is likely that some words have more than one meaning; and if we don’t pay attention to the structure of the sentence, it can become ambiguous for the computer and it may not understand what we intended to say. But, as the researcher previously mentioned said, “the whole world of multimedia information can only be structured, indexed and navigated through language”, so it is just a question of years and development that HLT works without any problem.
- Natural language processing. (2009, March 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 15:58, March 5, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language_processing&oldid=275161330
- Human Language Technologies (HLT). (2009). In Meraka Institute. Retrieved 12:46, March 16, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm
- Language Technology, a First Overview. (2009). In Hans Uszkoreit, Universität des Saarlandes. Retrieved 11:32, March 18, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/LT.pdf
