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Language Technology A First Overview: Hans Uszkoreit 1. Scope

This document provides an overview of language technology by Hans Uszkoreit. It discusses how language technology deals with human language in its spoken and written forms using speech and text technologies. It also links language to knowledge using representation systems. The document outlines some applications of language technology like natural language interfaces for databases, information retrieval, translation tools, and communication assistance. Finally, it summarizes some key technologies involved in language processing tasks like speech recognition, text summarization, and question answering.

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Marta Sampedro Gonzalez
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70 views4 pages

Language Technology A First Overview: Hans Uszkoreit 1. Scope

This document provides an overview of language technology by Hans Uszkoreit. It discusses how language technology deals with human language in its spoken and written forms using speech and text technologies. It also links language to knowledge using representation systems. The document outlines some applications of language technology like natural language interfaces for databases, information retrieval, translation tools, and communication assistance. Finally, it summarizes some key technologies involved in language processing tasks like speech recognition, text summarization, and question answering.

Uploaded by

Marta Sampedro Gonzalez
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Language Technology

A First Overview
Hans Uszkoreit

1. Scope
Language technologies are information technologies that are specialized for dealing with the
most complex information medium in our world: human language. Therefore these technologies
are also often subsumed under the term Human Language Technology. Human language
occurs in spoken and written form. Whereas speech is the oldest and most natural mode of
language communication, complex information and most of human knowledge is maintained
and transmitted in written texts. Speech and text technologies process or produce language in
these two modes of realization. But language also has aspects that are shared between
speech and text such as dictionaries, most of grammar and the meaning of sentences. Thus
large parts of language technology cannot be subsumed under speech and text technologies.
Among those are technologies that link language to knowledge. We do not know how
language, knowledge and thought are represented in the human brain. Nevertheless, language
technology had to create formal representation systems that link language to concepts and
tasks in the real world. This provides the interface to the fast growing area of knowledge
technologies.

In our communication we mix language with other modes of communication and other informa-
tion media. We combine speech with gesture and facial expressions. Digital texts are combined
with pictures and sounds. Movies may contain language and spoken and written form. Thus
speech and text technologies overlap and interact with many other technologies that facilitate
processing of multimodal communication and multimedia documents.

multimedia &
multimodality
technologies

speech text
technologies technologies

language
technologies

knowledge
technologies

For a comprehensive introduction to the field, the reader is referred to: Cole R.A., J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, G. Varile,
A. Zaenen, V. Zue, A. Zampolli (Eds.) (1997) Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cam-
bridge University Press and Giardini. (http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/HLT-Survey.pdf)

Hans Uszkoreit -1- Language Technology


2. Applications
Although existing LT systems are far from achieving human ability, they have numerous
possible applications. 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 between
human and computer is merely a communication problem. Today's computers do not
understand our language but computer languages are difficult to learn and do not correspond to
the structure of human thought. Even if the language the machine understands and its domain
of discourse are very restricted, the use of human language can increase the acceptance of
software and the productivity of its users.
Friendly technology should listen and speak
Natural language interfaces enable the user to communicate with the computer in French,
English, German, or another human language. Some applications of such interfaces are
database queries, information retrieval from texts, so-called expert systems, and robot control.
Current advances in the recognition of spoken language improve the usability of many types of
natural language systems. Communication with computers using spoken language will have a
lasting impact upon the work environment; completely new areas of application for information
technology will open up.
However, spoken language needs to be combined with other modes of communication such as
pointing with mouse or finger. If such multimodal communication is finally embedded in an
effective general model of cooperation, we have succeeded in turning the machine into a
partner. The ultimate goal of research is the omnipresent access to all kinds of technology and
to the global information structure by natural interaction. In an ambitious but not too far-fetched
scenario, language technology provides the interface to an ambient intelligence providing
assistance at work and in many situations of daily life.
Machines can also help people communicate with each other
Language technologies can also help people communicate with each other. Much older than
communication problems between human beings and machines are those between people with
different mother tongues. One of the original aims of language technology 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. Less than perfect automatic
translations can also be of great help to information seekers who have to search through large
amounts of texts in foreign languages.
The most serious bottleneck for e-commerce is the volume of communication between
business and customers or among businesses. Language technology can help to sort, filter and
route incoming email. It can also assist the customer relationship agent to look up information
and to compose a response. In cases where questions have been answered before, language
technology can find appropriate earlier replies and automatically respond.
Language is the fabric of the web
The rapid growth of the Internet/WWW and the emergence of the information society pose
exciting new challenges to language technology. Although the new media combine text,
graphics, sound and movies, the whole world of multimedia information can only be structured,
indexed and navigated through language. For browsing, navigating, filtering and processing the
information on the web, we need software that can get at the contents of documents. Language
technology for content management is a necessary precondition for turning the wealth of digital
information into collective knowledge. The increasing multilinguality of the web constitutes an
additional challenge for language technology. The global web can only be mastered with the
help of multilingual tools for indexing and navigating. Systems for crosslingual information and
knowledge management will surmount language barriers for e-commerce, education and
international cooperation.

Hans Uszkoreit -2- Language Technology


3. Technologies

In the following a selection of the most relevant language technologies will be summarized. By
clicking on the names of the technologies, you can access additional information.

Speech recognition
Spoken language is recognized and transformed in
into text as in dictation systems, into commands as
in robot control systems, or into some other internal
representation.

Speech synthesis
Utterances in spoken language are produced from text
(text-to-speech systems) or from internal representations
of words or sentences (concept-to-speech systems)

Text categorization
This technology assigns texts to categories. Texts may
belong to more than one category, categories may
contain other categories. Filtering is a special case of
categorization with just two categories.

Text Summarization
The most relevant portions of a text are extracted as
a summary. The task depends on the needed lengths
of the summaries. Summarization is harder if the
summary has to be specific to a certain query.

Text Indexing
As a precondition for document retrieval, texts are
are stored in an indexed database. Usually a text
is indexed for all word forms or – after lemmatization –
for all lemmas. Sometimes indexing is combined
with categorization and summarization.

Text Retrieval
Texts are retrieved from a database that best match
a given query or document. The candidate documents
are ordered with respect to their expected relevance.
Indexing, categorization, summarization and retrieval
are often subsumed under the term information retrieval.

Information Extraction
Relevant information pieces of information are discovered
and marked for extraction. The extracted pieces can be:
the topic, named entities such as company, place or
person names, simple relations such as prices, desti-
nations, functions etc. or complex relations describing
accidents, company mergers or football matches.

Data Fusion and Text Data Mining


Extracted pieces of information from several sources are
combined in one database. Previously undetected
relationships may be discovered.

Hans Uszkoreit -3- Language Technology


Question Answering
Natural language queries are used to access
information in a database. The database may
be a base of structured data or a repository of
digital texts in which certain parts have been marked
as potential answers.

Report Generation
A report in natural language is produced that describes
the essential contents or changes of a database. The
report can contain accumulated numbers, maxima,
minima and the most drastic changes.

Spoken Dialogue Systems


The system can carry out a dialogue with a human
user in which the user can solicit information or conduct
purchases, reservations or other transactions.

Translation Technologies
Technologies that translate texts or assist human trans-
lators. Automatic translation is called machine translation.
Translation memories use large amounts of texts together
with existing translations for efficient look-up of possible
translations for words, phrases and sentences.

4. Methods and Resources


As the investigation and modelling of human language is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, the
methods of language technology come from several disciplines: computer science, compu-
tational and theoretical linguistics, mathematics, electrical engineering and psychology.

Generic CS Methods
Programming languages, algorithms for generic data types, and software engineering methods
for structuring and organizing software development and quality assurance.

Specialized Algorithms
Dedicated algorithms have been designed for parsing, generation and translation, for morpho-
logical and syntactic processing with finite state automata/transducers and many other tasks.

Nondiscrete Mathematical Methods


Statistical techniques have become especially successful in speech processing, information
retrieval, and the automatic acquisition of language models. Other methods in this class are
neural networks and powerful techniques for optimization and search.

Logical and Linguistic Formalisms


For deep linguistic processing, constraint based grammar formalisms are employed. Complex
formalisms have been developed for the representation of semantic content and knowledge.

Linguistic Knowledge
Linguistic knowledge resources for many languages are utilized: dictionaries, morphological
and syntactic grammars, rules for semantic interpretation, pronunciation and intonation.

Corpora and Corpus Tools


Large collections of application-specific or generic collections of spoken and written language
are exploited for the acquisition and testing of statistical or rule-based language models.

Hans Uszkoreit -4- Language Technology

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