Language and Communication Technologies

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Language and Communication Technologies (LCT; also known as human language technologies or language technology for short) is the scientific study of technologies that explore language and communication. It is an interdisciplinary field that encompasses the fields of computer science, linguistics and cognitive science.

Contents

History

One of the first problems to be studied in the 1950s, shortly after the invention of computers, was an LCT problem, namely the translation of human languages. The large amounts of funding poured into machine translation testifies to the perceived importance of the field, right from the beginning. It was also in this period that scholars started to develop theories of language and communication based on scientific methods. In the case of language, it was Noam Chomsky who refines the goal of linguistics as a quest for a formal description of language, [1] whilst Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver provided a mathematical theory that linked communication with information. [2]

Computers and related technologies have provided a physical and conceptual framework within which scientific studies concerning the notion of communication within a computational framework could be pursued. Indeed, this framework has been fruitful on a number of levels. For a start, it has given birth to a new discipline, known as natural language processing (NLP), or computational linguistics (CL). This discipline studies, from a computational perspective, all levels of language from the production of speech to the meanings of texts and dialogues. And over the past 40 years, NLP has produced an impressive computational infrastructure of resources, techniques, and tools for analyzing sound structure (phonology), word structure (morphology), grammatical structure (syntax) and meaning structure (semantics). As well as being important for language-based applications, this computational infrastructure makes it possible to investigate the structure of human language and communication at a deeper scientific level than was ever previously possible.

Moreover, NLP fits in naturally with other branches of computer science, and in particular, with artificial intelligence (AI). [3] From an AI perspective, language use is regarded as a manifestation of intelligent behaviour by an active agent. The emphasis in AI-based approaches to language and communication is on the computational infrastructure required to integrate linguistic performance into a general theory of intelligent agents that includes, for example, learning generalizations on the basis of particular experience, the ability to plan and reason about intentionally produced utterances, the design of utterances that will fulfill a particular set of goals. Such work tends to be highly interdisciplinary in nature, as it needs to draw on ideas from such fields as linguistics, cognitive psychology, and sociology. LCT draws on and incorporates knowledge and research from all these fields.

Today

Language and communication are so fundamental to human activity that it is not at all surprising to find that Language and Communication Technologies affect all major areas of society, including health, education, finance, commerce, and travel. Modern LCT is based on a dual tradition of symbols and statistics. This means that nowadays research on language requires access to large databases of information about words and their properties, to large scale computational grammars, to computational tools for working with all levels of language, and to efficient inference systems for performing reasoning. By working computationally it is possible to get to grips with the deeper structure of natural languages, and in particular, to model the crucial interactions between the various levels of language and other cognitive faculties.

Relevant areas of research in LCT include:

Educational programs

The increasing interest in the field is proved by the existence of several European Masters in this dynamic research area: [4] Degree programmes of the University of Groningen include Language and Communication Technologies.

Erasmus Mundus Masters:

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Language</span> Structured system of communication

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<i>Syntactic Structures</i> Book by Noam Chomsky

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara J. Grosz</span> American computer scientist (born 1948)

Barbara J. Grosz CorrFRSE is an American computer scientist and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University. She has made seminal contributions to the fields of natural language processing and multi-agent systems. With Alison Simmons, she is co-founder of the Embedded EthiCS programme at Harvard, which embeds ethics lessons into computer science courses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Ball (cognitive scientist)</span> American cognitive scientist

John Samuel Ball is an American cognitive scientist, an expert in machine intelligence, computer architecture and the inventor of Patom Theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pascale Fung</span> Professor

Pascale Fung (馮雁) is a professor in the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology(HKUST). She is the director of the Centre for AI Research (CAiRE) at HKUST. She is an elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for her “contributions to human-machine interactions”, an elected Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association for “fundamental contributions to the interdisciplinary area of spoken language human-machine interactions” and an elected Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for her “significant contributions toward statistical NLP, comparable corpora, and building intelligent systems that can understand and empathize with humans”.

References

  1. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, London: Mouton, 1957.
  2. Shannon, CE (1948). "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". 9p.io. Archived from the original on 1998-01-31. Retrieved 2011-03-21.
  3. AITopics / NaturalLanguage. Aaai.org. Retrieved on 2011-03-21. Archived 2008-07-31 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Erasmus Mundus – Action 1 – Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses (EMMCs) | EACEA. Eacea.ec.europa.eu. Retrieved on 2011-03-21.