Survey Of The State Of The Art In Human Language Technology

Languages, in all their forms, are the more efficient and natural means for people to communicate. Enormous quantities of information are produced, distributed and consumed using languages. Human language technology's main purpose is to allow the use of automatic systems and tools to assist humans in producing and accessing information, to improve communication between humans, and to assist humans in communicating with machines. This book, sponsored by the Directorate General XIII of the European Union and the Information Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation, USA, offers the first comprehensive overview of the human language technology field.

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.

This volume sign posts several paths of multimodality research and theory-building today. The chapters represent a cross-section of current perspectives on multimodal discourse with a special focus on theoretical and methodological issues (mode hierarchies, modelling semiotic resources as multiple semiotic systems, multimodal corpus annotation). In addition, it discusses a wide range of applications for multimodal description in fields like mathematics, entertainment, education, museum design, medicine and translation.

"This book is a reference guide for researchers entering the promising field of conversational agents, providing an introduction to fundamental concepts in the field, collecting experiences of researchers working on conversational agents, and reviewing techniques for the design and application of conversational agents"--

Learn step-by-step how to develop knowledge-based products for international use! Knowledge Organization and Classification in International Information Retrieval examines current efforts to deal with the increasing globalization of information and knowledge. International authors walk you through the theoretical foundations and conceptual elements behind knowledge management, addressing areas such as the Internet, multinational resources, translations, and information languages. The tools, techniques, and case studies provided in this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in bridging the international information retrieval language gap. This book is divided into four sections that address major themes for internationalized information and knowledge: “General Bibliographic Systems” discusses how bibliographic classification systems can be adapted for specific subjects, the problems with addressing different language expressions, and the future of these systems “Information Organization in Knowledge Resources” explores knowledge organization and classification, focusing mainly on libraries and on the Internet “Linguistics, Terminology, and Natural Language Processing” analyzes the latest developments in language processing and the design of information retrieval tools and resources “Knowledge in the World and the World of Knowledge” addresses the ontological foundations of knowledge organization and classification and knowledge management in organizations from different cultures With this book, you’ll gain a better understanding about the international efforts to globalize: the Dewey Decimal Classification the Library of Congress Classification the Universal Decimal Classification multilingual thesauri Web directories of education-related resources human language technology metadata schemas the North American Industry Classification Figures, tables, charts, and diagrams elucidate the concepts in Knowledge Organization and Classification in International Information Retrieval. Information educators and practitioners as well as specialists in classification and knowledge organization will find this book valuable for its focus on the problems of—and solutions for—information retrieval for specific linguistic, cultural, and domain communities of discourse.

Technology has revolutionized the field of translation, bringing drastic changes to the way translation is studied and done. To an average user, technology is simply about clicking buttons and storing data. What we need to do is to look beyond a system’s interface to see what is at work and what should be done to make it work more efficiently. This book is both macroscopic and microscopic in approach: macroscopic as it adopts a holistic orientation when outlining the development of translation technology in the last forty years, organizing concepts in a coherent and logical way with a theoretical framework, and predicting what is to come in the years ahead; microscopic as it examines in detail the five stages of technology-oriented translation procedure and the strengths and weaknesses of the free and paid systems available to users. The Future of Translation Technology studies, among other issues: The Development of Translation Technology Major Concepts in Computer-aided Translation Functions in Computer-aided Translation Systems A Theoretical Framework for Computer-Aided Translation Studies The Future of Translation Technology This book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of translational studies and computational linguistics, and a guide to system users and professionals.

This text assesses the importance of language technology to increasingly popular computer-assisted language learning work. The book contains writings on pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing, testing, distance learning and user studies.