Questionnaire #1: Europe’s Human Language Technology Research Centers

1. University of Trento

As their own web page defin the course they impart:

Human language technology (HLT) is becoming increasingly essential to analyze, understand and exploit the huge amounts of information currently available in the form of web, textual or spoken documents. HLT gives people the possibility of using speech and/or natural language to interact to conversational machines and support advanced services. Service and technology providers are therefore strong supporters of this technology. The Master in Human Language Technology and Interfaces aims at providing skills in the basic theories, algorithms, and applications of this technology through courses taught by internationally recognized researchers from the university, research centers and supporting industry partners. This master is aimed both to students seeking advanced education to pursue a career in the HLTI industry or research track (e.g. PhD). Educational credits gained completing this program can be partly recognized to students afterwards admitted to the ICT International Doctoral School.

2. European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies

ELSNET is a Europe-based forum dedicated to human language technologies. It operates in an international context, and will consider, across discipline limits, all human communication research areas related to speech and language.

ELSNET aims to advance R&D in human language technologies in Europe by bringing together the key players in the field, and by providing a proactive, open forum which will serve as different purposes such as: a platform for launching innovative actions, a platform for making analyses of the present, and developing visions for the future or a platform for fostering a common environment, comprising resources, standards and evaluation.

3.  German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence

As they say about theirselves:

Our mission 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 true needs of the end user and the demands of the market

We develop novel and improved applications in three areas: Information and Knowledge Management. Document Production, Natural Communication

One of our commercial activities is indexing of German and English texts using the IDX software package.

References.

• International Master in Human Language Technology and Interfaces. From University of Trento. Retrieved 7 March, 2009, 14:02 In: http://old.disi.unitn.it/disi/edu/hlti/home.xml
• About us. From European Network of Excellence in Human Language technologies.Retrieved 7, March 2009, 14:39. In: http://www.elsnet.org/about.html?table
• Language Technology Lab. In General research center of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 7, March 2009: 15:21. In: http://www.dfki.de/lt/

Questionnaire #1: Yorik Wilks. Short biography.

Yorick Wilks was borned in 1939, he was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge and was an early pioneer in meaning-based approaches to the understanding of natural language content by computers. Since the early 70s he has worked in several research projects all over in convination with being proffesor the world: California, Switzerland, Edinburg, Essex, Sheffield, and finally Oxford.  His interests are artificial intelligence and the computer processing of language, knowledge and belief, and his recent books shows a development of those researches such as: Digital Technologies Shaping e-Research, The Semantic Web and the Apotheosis of annotation. In Proceedings of IEEE Information Systems.and Cross Domain Dialogue Act Tagging. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language, Resources and Evaluation… His work has been so congratulated that we can find the following awards in his career since its early beginning:

• 2008 Zampolli Prize (ELDA, awarded at LREC-08 in Marrakech, Morocco)
• 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award (ACL, awarded at ACL-08 in Columbus, OH)
• 2006 Visiting Professor, University of Oxford (2006-)
• 2004 Elected to UK Computing Research Council
• 2004 Elected fellow, British Computer Society
• 2003 Visiting Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
• 1998 Elected Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence
• 1997 Elected Fellow, EPSRC College of Computing
• 1991 Visiting Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
• 1991 Elected Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence
• 1983 Royal Society Travel Fellowship
• 1983 Commonwealth of Australia Visiting Professor
• 1981 Visiting Sloan Fellow, University of California, Berkeley
• 1980 Invited Participant in the Nobel Symposium on Language, Stockholm
• 1979 NATO Senior Scientist Fellowship
• 1979 Visiting Sloan Fellow, Yale University
• 1975 SRC Senior Visiting Fellowship, University of Edinburgh

Yorick Wilks

References:

• Yorick Wilks. (2009, January 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 20:21, March 4, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yorick_Wilks&oldid=261889889
• Yorick Wilks. In The University of Sheffield. Retrieved 20:31, March 4, 2009, from http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~yorick/cv.html
• Yorick Wilks. In Oxford Internet Institute. Retrieved 20:44, March 4, 2009, from http://people.oii.ox.ac.uk/yorick/

Questionnaire #1: Human Language Technologies, definitions.

According to a survey published by Cambridge University Press and Giardini:

Human Language Technologies are a very important way of communication as languages are, above all, the first way of communication all over the world. In addition with the help that globalization has provided Language technology offers people the opportunity to improve their communication. The ability to exchange communicative messages with the comoputers have been serached by many engineers and scholars. Hawever, the Human Language Technologies has got very difficult problems to create them such as Speaking Mode, speaking style, enrollment or language model to name some.

As CORDIS, an European Centre of Investigation in Human language tachnologies, defines HLT are:

The overall objective of HLT is to support e-business in a global context and to promote a human centred infostructure ensuring equal access and usage opportunities for all. This is to be achieved by developing multilingual technologies and demonstrating exemplary applications providing features and functions that are critical for the realisation of a truly user friendly Information Society. Projects address generic and applied RTD from a multi- and cross-lingual perspective, and undertake to demonstrate how language specific solutions can be transferred to and adapted for other languages.

References:

• Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology (1997) In German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence. Retrieved 12:02, March 2nd 2009. From http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/HLT-Survey.pdf
• Human Language Technologies. In Cordis Europe. Retrieved 28th March 2009, 16:01. From: http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/ka3/hlt.htm
• Human Language Technologies for Knowledge Management: Challenges and Opportunities (by Mark Maybury) In information Technologies Delivery. retrieved 13:03, March 2nd 2009. From http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1120000/1118222/p2-maybury.pdf?key1=1118222&key2=6938995321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=24258607&CFTOKEN=63055578

Note: This post has been updated on Saturday 28th March 2009 (16:22)