With regard to definitions of Human Language Technology, Hans Uszkoreit, in a research carried out with some companions, describes it as “a technology that covers a broad range of activities with the eventual goal of enabling people to communicate with machines using natural communication skills”. Besides, he also points out that “research and development activities include among other things, the coding, recognition, interpretation, translation and generation of the language“.
Another different definition is given by some researchers from the Meraka Institute, which is an African advanced institute for information and communication technology. As they see it, human language technology, “makes it easier for people to interact with machines benefiting 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”.
Finally, I would like to mention some research centres in Europe that i will describe later in further articles. Number amongst them, “The National Centre for Language Technology”, also known as “NCLT”, the “Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz”, also called as “DFKI” and the “Edinburgh Language Technology Group”, better known as “LTG”.
References:
- Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology (Cambridge University Press and Giardini 1997), in German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 1st March, 2009 from http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/HLT-Survey.pdf
- Human Language Technologies (HLT) From African Advance Institute for Information & Technology. Retrieved 7th March, 2009. 13:08 from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm
- Human Language Technologies (HLT). From National Centre for Language Technology. Retrieved 7th March, 2009 13:30 from http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/
- Human Language Technologies (HLT). From Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz. Retrieved 7th March, 2009 13:35 from http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php
- Human Language Technologies (HLT). From Edinburgh Language Technology Group. Retrieved 7th March, 2009 13:40 from http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/
