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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.
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.
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:
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:
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:
Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science - specifically Artificial Intelligence - and linguistics. It is primarily concerned with providing computers the ability to process data encoded in natural language, typically collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches of machine learning and deep learning.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
Natural-language understanding (NLU) or natural-language interpretation (NLI) is a subset of natural-language processing in artificial intelligence that deals with machine reading comprehension. Natural-language understanding is considered an AI-hard problem.
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Cognitive science is the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence . Practically every formal introduction to cognitive science stresses that it is a highly interdisciplinary research area in which psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, and biology are its principal specialized or applied branches. Therefore, we may distinguish cognitive studies of either human or animal brains, the mind and the brain.
Language technology, often called human language technology (HLT), studies methods of how computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. Working with language technology often requires broad knowledge not only about linguistics but also about computer science. It consists of natural language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL) on the one hand, many application oriented aspects of these, and more low-level aspects such as encoding and speech technology on the other hand.
George Armitage Miller was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
The cognitive revolution was an intellectual movement that began in the 1950s as an interdisciplinary study of the mind and its processes, from which emerged a new field known as cognitive science. The preexisting relevant fields were psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The approaches used were developed within the then-nascent fields of artificial intelligence, computer science, and neuroscience. In the 1960s, the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies and the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego were influential in developing the academic study of cognitive science. By the early 1970s, the cognitive movement had surpassed behaviorism as a psychological paradigm. Furthermore, by the early 1980s the cognitive approach had become the dominant line of research inquiry across most branches in the field of psychology.
The European Master on Software Engineering, or European Masters Programme in Software Engineering (EMSE) is a two-year joint Master of Science (Msc) program coordinated by four European universities, funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
Digital infinity is a technical term in theoretical linguistics. Alternative formulations are "discrete infinity" and "the infinite use of finite means". The idea is that all human languages follow a simple logical principle, according to which a limited set of digits—irreducible atomic sound elements—are combined to produce an infinite range of potentially meaningful expressions.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing:
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.
John Samuel Ball is an American cognitive scientist, an expert in machine intelligence, computer architecture and the inventor of Patom Theory.
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”.