Language technology

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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. [1] 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.

Note that these elementary aspects are normally not considered to be within the scope of related terms such as natural language processing and (applied) computational linguistics, which are otherwise near-synonyms. As an example, for many of the world's lesser known languages, the foundation of language technology is providing communities with fonts and keyboard setups so their languages can be written on computers or mobile devices. [2]

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The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related to information retrieval, knowledge representation and computational linguistics, a subfield of linguistics. Typically data is collected in text corpora, using either rule-based, statistical or neural-based approaches in machine learning and deep learning.

In linguistics and natural language processing, a corpus or text corpus is a dataset, consisting of natively digital and older, digitalized, language resources, either annotated or unannotated.

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. NLU has been considered an AI-hard problem.

Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation.

Computational semiotics is an interdisciplinary field that applies, conducts, and draws on research in logic, mathematics, the theory and practice of computation, formal and natural language studies, the cognitive sciences generally, and semiotics proper. The term encompasses both the application of semiotics to computer hardware and software design and, conversely, the use of computation for performing semiotic analysis. The former focuses on what semiotics can bring to computation; the latter on what computation can bring to semiotics.

In the field of human–computer interaction, a Wizard of Oz experiment is a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being.

Martin Kay was a computer scientist, known especially for his work in computational linguistics.

The Centre for Excellence in Computational Engineeringand Networking (CEN) at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, a research university in India, is a research and teaching center works on technologies to solving computational problems that can be applied in real world projects. The centre is involved in research projects funded by organizations like ISRO, NPOL, Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and Department of Science and Technology.The center is involved in the areas of Artificial intelligence, Cyber security, Computer networks, Computational Linguistics, Data science and Natural Language Processing. A translation project is underway to develop tools to translate web content from English to Indian languages. Research is also ongoing in the area of speech translation.

Linguistic categories include

Mobile translation is any electronic device or software application that provides audio translation. The concept includes any handheld electronic device that is specifically designed for audio translation. It also includes any machine translation service or software application for hand-held devices, including mobile telephones, Pocket PCs, and PDAs. Mobile translation provides hand-held device users with the advantage of instantaneous and non-mediated translation from one human language to another, usually against a service fee that is, nevertheless, significantly smaller than a human translator charges.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital infinity</span> Term in theoretical linguistics

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:

<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">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”.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rada Mihalcea</span> American computer scientist

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She has made contributions to natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science. With Paul Tarau, she is the co-inventor of TextRank Algorithm, which is widely used for text summarization.

Madeleine Ashcraft Bates is a researcher in natural language processing who worked at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. She was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1985, and co-editor of the book Challenges in Natural Language Processing (1993).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vera Demberg</span> Professor of Computer Science and Computational Linguistics

Vera Demberg is a German computational linguist and professor of computer science and computational linguistics at Saarland University.

References

  1. Uszkoreit, Hans. "DFKI-LT - What is Language Technology" . Retrieved 16 November 2018.
  2. "SIL Writing Systems Technology". sil.org. Retrieved 9 December 2019.