Language Technology is often called Human Language Technology (HLT) or Natural Language Processing (NLP) and consists of computational linguistics (or CL) and speech technology as its core, but includes also many application oriented aspects of them. Language technology is closely connected to Computer Science and general linguistics.
According to the Meraka Institute (an African Advanced Institute for Information and Comunication Technology), Human Language Technology makes it easier for people to interact with machines, what can benefit a wide range of people working with computers.
An important role of Human Language Technology are digital libraries. Instead of wasting paper and space by keeping books in traditional libraries such as the ones we have by now, pages on the internet which content different types of books or reading issues in general have started to grow. Another important advantage of all this are the facilities we’re given: searching for information on the internet is always easier than searching for it on paper.
Apart from Meraka Institute, another important centre of research is HLTC, a multidisciplinary research place at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) whose mission is to lead state-of-the-art research directions that drive the development of new applications in both text and spoken language technology. HLTC is led by six faculty members from the EEE and the CS departments, and some Systems built at HLTC include automated language translation for the Internet, speech-based web browsing, and speech recognition for the telephone.
The definition given by the ‘Language Technology World’ group is the one that follows: “Language technology (LT), also Human Language Technology (HLT), is the cover term for all information technologies specialized for dealing with text and speech in human language. It is also the field of engineering in which LT methods and applications are developed.” And as it’s seen as a fields of engineering, nowadays it is very commonly investigated, so as to make deeper the knowledge of all these new technologies we’re learning how to deal with.
REFERENCES:
-Human Language Technology. (2007). In Meraka Institute. Retrieved 12:09, February 25, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm
-Language technology. (2008, April 1). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:17, February 25, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Language_technology&oldid=202607020
-Human Language Technology (2002) in “Using Human Language Technology for Automatic Annotation and Indexing of Digital Library Content ” (written by Kalina Bontcheva, Diana Maynard, Hamish Cunningham, and Horacio Saggion). Retrieved 13:13, March 09, 2009, from http://www.springerlink.com/content/drtjr092ejyk1eyk/
-Natural language processing. (2009, March 5). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 11:24, March 16, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language_processing&oldid=275161330
-Human Language Technology on ‘Language Technology World’ (2009). Retrieved 12:47, March 16, 2009 from http://www.lt-world.org
