Taking a look at different sites on the Internet, we can see that there are several definitions for Human Language Technologies or Natural Language Processing.
Here there are some of these definitions:
– From The Free Dictionary:
Computer analysis and generation of natural language text. The goal is to enable natural languages, such as English, French, or Japanese, to serve either as the medium through which users interact with computer systems such as database management systems and expert systems (natural language interaction), or as the object that a system processes into some more useful form such as in automatic text translation or text summarization (natural language text processing).
– From Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia:
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into readable human language. Natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate. Many problems within NLP apply to both generation and understanding; for example, a computer must be able to model morphology (the structure of words) in order to understand an English sentence, but a model of morphology is also needed for producing a grammatically correct English sentence.
So, with these definitions we can conclude that Human Language Technologies (also called Natural Language Processing) is a part of computer science, and it is used to connect someway our own language with computers, so communication is easier. Anyway, this technique is still being improved.
References:
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Natural Language Processing. (2002). In The Free Dictionary by Farlex. Retrieved 17:00, March 8, 2009, from: http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/human+language+technology
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Natural Language Processing. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:09, March 8, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing
