In this article I’m going to mention some of the recent research topics that are developed at major sites on Human Language Technologies.

The Language Technology Lab (DFKI) in research, development and commercial projects elaborates the following themes:

• 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 recognized 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.

 

The European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (ELSNET) points out these topics:

• automated retrieval, extraction, and enrichment of information and knowledge from multimedia, multi-lingual, and multiparty information sources.
• translingual and crosslingual retrieval, presentation, and sharing of knowledge.
• automated detection and tracking of emerging topics from unstructured multimedia data.
• use of knowledge sources to facilitate knowledge mapping and access.
• automated question answering from heterogeneous source.
• intelligent tools that support the automated bibliometrics and document analysis/understanding in support of discovery of distributed experts and communities of expertise.
• summarization and presentation generation of knowledge.
• modeling of user knowledge, beliefs, plans, (dis)abilities and preferences from queries, created artifacts, and human computer interactions.

 

The Language Technology Group conducts research and development in in a number of areas such as:

• combining shallow semantics and domain knowledge.
• text mining for biomedical content curation.
• cross-retail multi-agent retail comparison.
• smart qualitative data: methods and community tools for data mark-up.
• machine learning for named entity recognition.
• integrated models and tools for fine-grained prosody in dicourse.
• joint action science and technology.
• AMI consortium projects that are developing technologies from meeting  browsing and to assist people participating in meetings from a remote location.
• study of how pairs collaborate when in planning a route on a map.

 

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in the area of language and speech processing is conducting both basic and applied research. They develop linguistic resources and processes as well as application prototypes:

Linguistic Resources and Processes

• Typed unification-based grammar formalisms.
• Development of a HPSG-based grammar for German.
• Natural Language Generation.
• Speech Synthesis.
• Computational Morphology.

 

Application Prototypes

• Natural language interfaces and advisory systems.
• Concept-to-speech systems.

 

The Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) offers the following list:

• Texts of all shorts which can be digitized medieval resources, web-sites, newspapers, digitized books, etc.
• Multimedia recordings (audio/video) and time series recorded during communication.
• Various types of manually or automatically created annotations on texts, media streams, etc.
• Tools such as aligners, speech recognizers, tokenizers, part-of-speech taggers, parses, manual annotators, viewers, etc.
• Various types of of knowledge sources encapsulating knowledge about resources and languages such as metadata descriptions, GIS, lexica, concept registries, ontologies, etc.

 

Sources:

*Language Technology Lab (OFAI, Germany). Retrieved 13:34, March 15, 2008, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/projects.php

*European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (ELSNET). Retrieved 18:45, March 15, 2008, from http://www.elsnet.org/

*Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG). Retrieved 13:15, March 15, 2008, from http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/

*Language Technology Group at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). Retrieved 13:34, March 15, 2008, from http://www.ofai.at/research/nlu/

*Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN). Retrieved 13:21, March 20, 2008, from http://www.clarin.eu/