We do have research centres in Europe and here we’ll explain some of them and what do they do:
Language Technology Lab (DFKI) which is in Germany. They focus on “tighter integration of shallow and deep techniques in processing, enriching deep processing with statistical methods, combining language checking with structuring tools in document authoring” and some other more, but we’ll be mentioning just few of them. They have three main areas: Information and Knowledge Management, Natural Commnunication and Document Production.
Another important centre is The Edinburgh Language Technology Group. They started 20 years ago, their main objective is to create easy solutions to real problems in text processing. As their web says “We have worked in all areas of large-volume text handling, from text annotation through markup architectures and from information extraction to automatic or computer-assisted generation of text.”
The last one that I mention here is situated in Ireland: National Centre for Language Techonology. The computers are the ones which guide the research into the processing of human language. Like speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, human-computer interfaces, information retrieval and extraction, the teaching and learning of languages using computers and software localisation and globalisation.
He works in the university of Saarland as a Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligente (DFKI). He helps in two other different interprasises, in one of them as a co-fundator and in the other one as an advisor.
He studied linguistics and Computer Science (in Belin and Austin). From 1982 to 1986 he worked in Menlo Park, in California, as a comjputer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Centre.
Here is the detailed CV with all his publications and what has he done during the years since he graduated.
He has written many books about the matter and colaborated with other specialists for the publication of other. The last one was in 2007 and called Methods and Application for Relation Detection, but there are a lot more, so here is the link to see them all.
Now he is interested in some researches, as the web says:
“models of human language processing that take into account realistic resource limitations in human cognition
models of linguistic knowledge that are shaped by the optimization of processing
language technology applications that demonstrate how even very limited language capabilities can add considerable value to software for handling electronic information, for processing texts and for communicating with machines
grammar of human language: theory, formalisms and engineering
According to Wikipedia the Natural Languages is a subfield of the Artificial intelligence and the ingenieril branch of linguistic. They are trying to make humans and machines comunicate by making the computer’s information into human’s language, what can be heard in the street in the everyday life. The HLT does not deal with the communication by a natural languages in an abstract way, but to design mechanisms to communicate effectivelly by programs that execute or simulate the communication.
We can see that Hans Uszkoreit has made a large and simple introduction of the definition of HLT:
“Language technology comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language.”
“The goal is to create software products that have some knowledge of human language. Such products are going to change our lives. They are urgently needed for improving human-machine interaction since the main obstacle in the interaction beween human and computer is a communication problem. It enables the user to communicate with the computer in French, English, German, or another human language.”
“Much older than communication problems between human beings and machines are those between people with different mother tongues. One of the original aims of computational linguistics has always been fully automatic translation between human languages. From bitter experience scientists have realized that they are still far away from achieving the ambitious goal of translating unrestricted texts. Nevertheless, they have been able to create software systems that simplify the work of human translators and clearly improve their productivity. The increasing multilinguality of the web constitutes an additional challenge for language technology.”
He uses a simple language to explain the complicated world of the scientifical language.
