Human Language Technologies

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7h Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2015, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2015. The 31 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Speech Processing; Multiword Expressions; Parsing; Language Resources and Tools; Ontologies and Wordnets; Machine Translation; Information and Data Extraction; Text Engineering and Processing; Applications in Language Learning; Emotions, Decisions and Opinions; Less-Resourced Languages.

Human language technology is the study of the methods by which computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. It consists of natural language processing and computational linguistics on the one hand, and speech technology on the other. This book presents the proceedings of the 9th International Conference, Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2020), organised in Kaunas, Lithuania on 22 and 23 September 2020. This biennial conference offers researchers a platform to share knowledge on recent advances in human language processing for the Baltic languages, as well as promoting interdisciplinary and international cooperation in human language-technology research within and beyond the Baltic States. In addition to the traditional topics of natural language processing and language technologies, this year’s conference featured a special session on resource and tool development for teaching and learning the less resourced Baltic languages. This year, 42 submissions were received, each of which was evaluated by two reviewers, resulting in a total of 34 papers being accepted for presentation and publication. The book is divided into four sections: speech and text analysis (9 papers); machine translation and natural understanding (6 papers); tools and resources (14 papers); and language learning resources (5 papers). Providing a fascinating overview of current research in the field from a primarily Baltic perspective, the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves human language technology.

Computational linguistics, speech processing, natural language processing and language technologies in general have all become increasingly important in an era of all-pervading technological development. This book, Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective, presents the proceedings of the 8th International Baltic Human Language Technologies Conference (Baltic HLT 2018), held in Tartu, Estonia, on 27-29 September 2018. The main aim of Baltic HLT is to provide a forum for sharing new ideas and recent advances in computational linguistics and related disciplines, and to promote cooperation between the research communities of the Baltic States and beyond. The 24 articles in this volume cover a wide range of subjects, including machine translation, automatic morphology, text classification, various language resources, and NLP pipelines, as well as speech technology; the latter being the most popular topic with 8 papers. Delivering an overview of the state-of-the-art language technologies from a Baltic perspective, the book will be of interest to all those whose work involves language processing in whatever form.

A major part of natural language processing now depends on the use of text data to build linguistic analyzers. We consider statistical, computational approaches to modeling linguistic structure. We seek to unify across many approaches and many kinds of linguistic structures. Assuming a basic understanding of natural language processing and/or machine learning, we seek to bridge the gap between the two fields. Approaches to decoding (i.e., carrying out linguistic structure prediction) and supervised and unsupervised learning of models that predict discrete structures as outputs are the focus. We also survey natural language processing problems to which these methods are being applied, and we address related topics in probabilistic inference, optimization, and experimental methodology. Table of Contents: Representations and Linguistic Data / Decoding: Making Predictions / Learning Structure from Annotated Data / Learning Structure from Incomplete Data / Beyond Decoding: Inference

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term “Information Society Age” seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

Throughout the last decade, the Baltic states have played an active role in regional and international language technology activities, supporting less-resourced languages in the digital age. This book presents the proceedings of the 7th International Conference: Human Language Technologies – The Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2016), held in Riga, Latvia, in October 2016. Baltic HLT 2016 provided a forum for sharing ideas and recent advances in human language processing with a special focus on less-resourced languages. Papers selected for the conference cover a wide range of topics, including a general overview of language technology progress in the Baltic states, actual research topics in written and spoken language processing, the creation of language resources and their applications, and proposals for a European language platform. The book is divided into five sections: overview; speech technologies and corpora; machine translation; written language resources; and methods and tools for language processing. The book will be a useful resource, not only for Baltic language researchers, but also for those working with other less-resourced languages in Europe and beyond.

This book contains papers from the Fourth International Conference on Human Language Technologies - the Baltic Perspective (Baltic HLT 2010), held in Riga in October 2010. This conference is the latest in a series which provides a forum for sharing recent advances in human language processing, and promotes cooperation between the computer science and linguistics communities of the Baltic countries and the rest of the world. Bringing together scientists, developers, providers and users, the conference is an opportunity to exchange information, discuss problems, find new synergies, and promote i.