EXPLANATION OF THREE RESEARCH TOPICS

Abril 19, 2008

         I’ m going to explain three of those research topics.

         First of all, I’m going to talk about Corpus Linguistics. The word Corpus may be used to refer to any text in written or spoken form. However in moder linguistics thisterm is used to refer to na large collection of texts which represent a sample of a particular variety or use of language that are presented in machine readable form. On the hand, we have to refer to Corpus Linguistics, which is now seeing as the study of linguistic phenomena through large collections of machine- readable texts: corpora. These are used within a number of research areas going from the Descriptive Study of the Syntaxis of a Language to Prosody or Language Learning, to mention but a few. Th use of real examples of texts in the study of language is not a new issue in the history of linguistics. However, Corpus Linguistics has develop considerably in the lst decades due to the great possibilities offered by the processing of natural language with computers.

 

            Secondly, I have to mention Semantics, which is the study of meanings in communication. In linguistics is the interpretation of sings as used by agents or communities within particulr circumstances and contexts. Semanticists differ on what constitutes meaning  in an expression. Tradicionally , the formal semantic view restricts semantics to each literal meaning, and relegates all figurative associations to pragmatics, but this distinction is increasingly difficult to defend. The degree to which a theorist subscribes to the literal- figurative distinction decreases as one moves from the formal semantic, semiotic, pragmatic, to the cognitive semantic traditions.

 

         Finally, I’m going to mention  Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL), is an approach to language teaching and learning in which computer technology is used as an aid to the presentation, reinforcement and assessment of material to be learned, usually including a substancial interactive element. The philosophy of this center is that the lessons should allow the learners to learn on their own using structure and/or unstructured interactive lessons. This lessons crry two important features: bidirectional (interactive ) learning and individualized learning. CALL is not a method. It is a tool that helps teachers to facilitate language learning process.

 

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Research Topics (Q.2)

Abril 16, 2008

     Here are some ofthe research topics of three European research centers:

     First of all, The German Language Technology Lab., which themes are elaborated in research, development and commercial projects:

  • Exploiting- and automatically extending- ontologies for content processing.
  • Tighter integration of shallow and deep techniques in processing.
  • Enriching deep processing with statistical methods.
  • Combining language checking with structuring tools in document authoring.
  • Document indexing for German and English.
  • Automatically associating recognize information with related information and thus building up collective knowledge.
  • Automatically structuring and visualizing extracted information.
  • Processing information encoded in multiple languages, among them Chinese and Japanese.

  

      Secondly, we can mention the projects of The Edinburgh Lnguage Technology Group, which conducts research and development in different areas.

  • Combining shallow semantics and domain knowledge.
  • Text mining for Biomedicational Content Curation.
  • Cross- retail Multi- agent Retail Comparison.
  • Smart Qualitative Data: methods and Community Tools for Data Mark-up.
  • Machine Learning for Name Entity Recognition.
  • Named entity tagging of historical parliamentary proceedings.
  • Integrated Models and Tools for Fine- Grained Prosody in Discourse.
  • Joint Action Science and Technology.
  • AMI consortion projects that are developing technologies for meeting browsing and to assit people participating in meetings from a remote location.
  • Study of how pairs collaborate when in planning a group on a map

 

       And finally,  The National Centre for Language, which research areas are the following ones:

  • CALL Computer Assisted Language Learning: Integrating CL/NLP/HLT Technology into CALL, CALL for Endangered Languages, CALL for Primary School Environments, CALL for Remedial Learners.
  • Corpus Linguistics: Collocation, Contrastive Computational Linguistics, Corpus- based Traslation Studies.
  • Machine Translation and Translation Technology: SMT, RBMT, EBMT, TMs, MAT, CAT.
  • Treebank- Based Unification Grammar Acquisition: Automatic Feature Structure Annotation Algorithms, Subcategorisation Frame Straction,…
  • Semantics: Discourse Representation Theory, Linear- Logic Based Semantics, Computational of Logic Forms from Treebanks, Open- Domain Question Answering Systems.
  • Speech Technology: Speaker Characterisation, Audio Classification, Retrieval and Coding, Human Computer Interfaces (HCIs).
  • Multilingual Information Retrieval/Extraction.
  • Language Evolution.

RESOURCES:

 

  • The Edinburgh  Language Technology Group. http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/, fecha de la consulta el 14 de marzo del 2008, hora de la consulta 20:15.

 


European Research Centers

Abril 14, 2008

There are some European research centers for Human Language Technologies, here are three examples:

  • Language Technology Lab., Germany.

           Their objective is the improvement of language technology through novel computational techniques for processing text, speech and knowledge, a deeper understanding of human language and thought, studying the needs of the users and the demands of the market. 

  • National Centre for Language Technology, Ireland.

               This centre conducts the research into the processing of Human Language through computers, for example speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation and others.

  • Edinburgh Language Technology Group, Scotland, UK.

           Is a research group that has been studying in the area of natural engineering  since the early 1990s.

          They focus on building practical solutions to real problems in text processing.

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Hans Uszkoreit

Abril 14, 2008

Hans Uszkoreits is Proffesor of Computational Linguistics of Saarland University and he also serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Laboratory. Apart from that he is Proffesor of the Computer Science Department.

      He has studied Linguistics and computer science at the Technicl University of Berlin and the University of Texas in Austin. During part of his live he has been working as a research associate in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center,he also worked as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park and in other similar ones.

    Hans is member of lots of academies, such as, permanent member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL) , Member of  the European Academy of Sciences, member  of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech and more and more.    

      Here are some of the recent publications of this proffesor :

  • Uszkoreit, H. (2007) Methods and Applications for Relation Detection. In: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Natural Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, 2007.
  •    Uszkoreit, H. F. Xu, W. Liu (2007) Challenges and Solutions of Multilingual and Translingual Information Service Systems , To appear in Proceedings of HCI International 2007, 12TH International Conference on Human- Computer Interaction, Beijing, 2007.
  • Busemann, S. and H. Uszkoreit (2004) Predicting the Future: Technology Roadmapping. In: ELSNews, (3) 2004.

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