What is human language technology?
The terms Human Language Technology (HLT) and Natural language Processing (NLP) are often used interchangeably, with the former emphasising more explicitly the technological aspect of language processing.HLT is an area of research and study concerned with the relationship between natural language and machines.
Human-machine interaction
| The creation of machines that can produce and understand natural languages like English or Maltese, and therefore, allow us to interact with them as if we were interacting with other humans. For example, imagine going into your study and hearing a voice saying: Good morning! Did you sleep well? Here’s your coffee. And that voice is your computer speaking to you, or a robot, i.e., a machine, a piece of technology that has learnt how to speak your language. Of course, current technology hasn't yet reached the stage where computers can converse with humans in a fully natural way, on any subject under the sun. However, there have been some significant advances in this area, and it continues to provide many fruitful avenues for research. |  |
Understanding the nature of language
In order to create viable computational models of natural language, we need to have clear ideas about how language works, and this will help us obtain insights into the nature of language. Creating machines that communicate therefore requires us to study both the structure of language itself, and the mental processes that underlie our production and comprehension of language. Thus, there are important links between researchers in HLT, and those in other areas of Cognitive Science, especially Psychology and Theoretical Linguistics.
Analysing linguistic data
Many researchers nowadays attempt to study language by using very large repositories of text or speech. These often run into several millions of words, and it's impossible to handle so much data by trawling through it manually. We therefore use computers to analyse such data, allowing us to come closer to our goal of understanding the structure and use of language. This data is also often used to "train" computer programs in order to be able to communicate better using language. Most of our day to day interactions, and the information we transmit and receive, involve language. Perhaps the most obvious example is the internet, an extremely rich source of information, a large part of which is in the form of language (as well as, say, pictures and streamed audio and movies). We need to be able to exploit this rich repository and to manipulate it to make communication more efficient.
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What does HLT cover?
- Machine translation: The automatic translation of text from one human language to another.
- Natural Language Understanding: The automatic analysis of linguistic messages (such as sentences) and their interpretation.
- Natural Language Generation: The automatic generation of text or speech from non-linguistic data.
- Question answering: Answering human-language questions.
- Automatic summarisation: Production of readable summaries of one or more texts.
- Speech recognition: "Translating" a person's speech into a textual representation.
- Text-to-Speech: Producing the spoken version of a printed text.
- Information retrieval: Storing, searching and retrieving information using language. This is the basic technology used by search engines such as Google and Yahoo!
...and this is just a sample!
Course programme: BSc Human language Technology
- Offered by: the Institute of Linguistics, University of Malta
- Launch date: October 2011
- Entry requirements: General university entry requirements
The course is aimed at
both those who have a background in Arts subjects, as well as those with a Science background (including IT and Mathematics). The first year is a ‘foundation’ year in which students are given the opportunity to explore the areas of linguistics and IT which they will need for the 2nd and 3rd years.
The course also offers placements, in which students will spend periods of time in real work environments and carry out project work.
Click here for full details, including the course programme.
Employment opportunities
The European Commission has identified Human Language Technology as one of the key research areas for the near future. The aim of research in this area is to enable users to communicate with the computer in their native language.
Human Language Technology is an area of great importance in research and production both in academic and in commercial sectors. The course provides students with the basic skills required in the sector, including programming, problem solving, project management, as well as knowledge on IT, language and language applications, which should allow them to seek opportunities of employment both in the IT sector, the language sector and in academia.
