HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

Human language techonology or HLT, it’s not only composed of computational linguistics, but also of speech technology. It’s important also to bear in mind, that Human Language Technology or Language technology is connected to both, computer science and general linguistics.

According to Hans Uszkoreit : “human language technology comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech.” Apart from that, he also points out that we have to take into account that: “these systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics.”

We could also find another definition or explanation of what “human language technology” (HLT) is, in the official web of Meraka Institute. As this institute says: “human language technology makes it easier for people to interact with machines. This can benefit a wide range of people-from illiterate farmer in remote villages who want to obtain relevant medical information over a cellphone, to scientists in state-of-the-art laboratories who want to focus on problem-solving with computers.”

Otherwise, The “Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland” (FiLT), states that: “language technology is a multidisciplinary field, which studies technical means and methods that can be used to process natural language with computers.”

Moreover, as this Documentation Centre says, some famous implementations of natural language technology (HLT) are for instance automatic authoring tools and also speech recognition. But Natural Language Technology has also other  application areas. Those are introduced in the “Technologies section” and in “Language Technology World” too.

 References:

.What is Language Technology? (2009). Hans Uszkoreit. In German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 20:07, March 01, 2009, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php

.Human Language Technologies. (2008, April 1). In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia . Retrieved 11:59, June 17, 2009, from http://www.wordmagicsoft.com/diccionario/en-es/joined.php

.Human Language Technologies. (2007). In Meraka institute. Retrieved 12:09, June 17, 2009, from http://www.meraka.org.za/humanLanguage.htm

.What is Language Technology? (2008). In Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland (FiLT). Retrieved 19:18, June 18, 2009, from https://kitwiki.csc.fi/twiki/bin/view/FiLT/FiLTWikiEn