Translation program characteristics according to the FEMTI

FEMTI is “an Evaluation Framework in Machine Translation in ISLE” that helps investigators to develop evaluation plans. FEMTI by combining two characteristic classifications: one define the possible contexts of use of a machine translation system, and the other one define a range of characteristics which are considered a good machine translation software.

A FEMTI good translation machine includes the development of the following items:

1. Functionality: accuracy, suitability, well-formedness, interoperability, funtionability compliance and security.
2. Reliability: madurity, fault tolerance, crashing frecuency, recoverability and reliability compliance.
3. Usability: understandability, learnability, operability, documentation, attractiveness and usability compliance.
4. Efficiency: time behaviour and resource utilisation.
5. Maintainability: analisability, changeability, stability, testability and mainantability compliance.
6. Portability: adaptability, installability, portability compliance, replaceability and co-existence.
7. Cost: introduction cost, maintenance cost, other costs.

If you have any doubt on these concepts, you can check their meaning in RUN FEMTY (in the left column) when you click on each noun.

Conferences for keeping yourself up to date in HLT

There are many people and associations around the world investigating and developing Human Language Technologies at the same time without knowing themselves.  Some associations  organize periodic conferences in order to share information about that subject among specialists working on that topic.

The web pages you can find at the botom of the article refers to conferences which are going to be done during this year about Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. There will be conferences given by scholars about the main topics of each conference, and workshops in which participants share its professional experience and knowledge with the others. It is a requisite to send a previous paper in which it is explained your topic to participate on the workshop.

In conclussion, if you work on Human Language Technologies you can up to date your knowledge and show your work to other people going to one of these meetings. Let’s do it!

Association for Computational Linguistics (2007) Conference in Prague.  Retrieved April 24, 2007.  From http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/acl2007/

Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2007) Retrieved April 24, 2007. From http://www.cs.rochester.edu/meetings/hlt-naacl07/

XXIII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. (2007) In Sevilla. Retrieved April 24, 2007.  From http://www.lsi.us.es/~sepln2007

5 reasons to study HLT

1. The labour of linguists working on computational language science make the balance between the rationalist tendency and the humanist tendency of knowledge.
2. The relation between men and machine is still careless, the lisguistic area in computer science needs language specialists and  software designers to build up  together a second generation of  improved Human Language Technologies.
3. Human Language Technologies is becoming a new working area for specialists who need a wide range of skills in language and computer systems which has to do with our studies, and we could apply for this kind of jobs in the future.
4. Human Language Technologies is an adequated research area for students who are interested on investigation.
5. Language technologies find their application in tools that help people and companies to work efficiently, and we also can take profit of this tools as users.

Reasons given by Inés Burguera.

Hanz Uszkoreit the scholar

 “Hans Uszkoreit is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. At the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the Germa Research Center for Artificial Int elligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Lab. He is also Professor of the Computer Science Department.” from Hanz Uszkoreit curriculum vitae. Retrieved April 25, 2007.

• He studied Linguistics and Computer Science at
  Berlin and in Austin Texas universities. During his time in Austine he also worked on research in a machine translation.
• From 1988 until 1986 he worked as a computer scientist at Artificial Intelligence Centre of SRI. Durind this time he also was working with The Stanford University for the Study of Languae and Information.
• In 1986 he worked for IBM Germany as a project leader in LILOG (Linguistic Computational Methods for the Understanding of German). He also taught inStantfort University.
• In 1988 he started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics at Saarland University.
• In 1989 he led the Language Technology Lab at DFKI.
• Nowadays he is member of many international comitees of computational linguistics and HLT such as the European Network of Language and Speech.
• “He is co-founder and Board Member of XtraMind Technologies GmbH, Saarbruecken, acrolinx gmbh,
  Berlin, and AnswerBus GmbH, Saarbrücken.
• “Since 2006, he serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the international initiative dropping knowledge.” Retrieved from his CV, April 25, 2007.

Hanz Uszkoreit has a large number of publications only in 2007 he has alrready published four articles. His recent publications can be found at his own page. Retrieved  April 25, 2007. 

Q1: European research centres for HLT

  1.  Språkteknologi the Swedish HLT centre:

“ Språkteknologi.se is the national language technology center in Sweden. Here, both the public, companies, researchers and others can find information about Swedish language technology: products, technologies, research reports, conferences, people, organizations, a large collection of Nordic and International links, and much more.”

Spraktekteknologi.se; Swedish Centre for Human Language Technologies ( 2007, March 28). Retrieved April 01, 2007. From: http://sprakteknologi.se/welcome-to-plone?set_language=en&cl=en OFAI an

    2.  Austrian centre which works in HLT

“Language Technology (LT) forms a major research area at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) since its inception in 1984. We conduct research in modelling and processing human languages, especially for German (…) The Language Technology Group at OFAI is  also a member of the EU’s European Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies (ELSNET) “

Austrian Research Institute for Antificial Intelligence. Language Technology Group (2005). Retrieved March 28, 2007,

http://www.ofai.at/research/nlu/

    3.  DCU the Irish centre for LT and HLT:

“ The National Centre for Language Technology conducts research into the processing of human language by computers (…)  Research in Human Language Technology is interdisciplinary and includes Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics “.

National Centre for Language Technology (2006 November 06) Dublin City University; Busines School. Retrieved April 01, 2007.

http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/index.html

Q1: HLT definitions

The deparment of liguistics from Hong Kongn’s University tell us that “Human Language Technology is a relatively new discipline that investigates two main issues. On the one hand it explores the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the ability to get technology, especially modern information communications technology (ICT), to interact with humans using natural language capabilities. On the other hand, it is a discipline that investigates how technologies, especially ICTs, can serve as useful adjuncts to humans in language understanding, including analysis, processing, storage and retrieval. This investigation could lead to practical applications, including the design of online learning environments for language learning and multilingual retrieval for automatic translation.”

BA Human Language Technology (not available) Hong Kong’s University. Retrieved March 28, 2007. http://www.hku.hk/linguist/pro/ba_hlt.html

A conference made in 2001 about this matter adds “Human language technologies promise solutions to challenges in human computer interaction, information access, and knowledge management. Advances in technology areas such as indexing, retrieval, transcription, extraction, translation, and summarization offer new capabilities for learning, playing and conducting business.”

Workshop on Human Language Technology and Knowledge management (2001 July 6-7) ACL’2001 Conference in Toulouse, France. Retreived March 21, 2005.
http://www.elsnet.org/acl2001-hlt+km.html

Q1 HLT definition by Hanz Uszkoreit

“Language technology — sometimes also referred to as human language technology — comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics.

We teach computers to communicate with people.”

Hans Uszkoreit. (2007). What is Language Technology? Language Technology Lab. Retrieved February 28, 2007, from http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php

Los metadatos en el contexto interdisciplinario

La Universidad de León celebrará los próximos días 18-20 de abril 2007, el 8º Congreso ISCO- España sobre “La interdisciplinariedad en la organización del conocimiento científico” 

La interdisciplinariedad “se orienta al enrriquecimientoto e intercambio racional de los métodos de las disciplinas (…) a fin de mejorar el estudio de lo real”  “Desde un punto de vista epistemológico la interdisciplinariedad trata de unificar el campo de acción de las disciplinas que estudian los hechos y fenómenos sociales”

Entre los temas del congreso se encuentran:

• Tendencias de investigación interdisciplinares y transdisciplinares.
• Representación y caracterización del conocimiento en el entorno digital.
• Procesamiento automático de la información.
• Catalogos y bases de datos bibliográficas FRBR, FRAR, FRSAR.
• Metadatos e identificadores en el entorno digital: Dublin Core, DOI, Croswef.

Los datos, metadatos contenidos y metacontenidos tienen un sentido práctico en los sistemas informáticos, pero donde toman verdadera importancia es en un contexto mayor, el social y en el caso del congreso en el estudio de los hechos y fenómenos sociales.

Data, metadata, contents and metacontents in a useful aplication: DOIS

Do we need data, metadata contents and metacontets? Of course we do, if we want to organize, classify storage and retrieval information. It was a traditional library duty, but nowadays we are dealing with  high computerized systems which are able to organize thousands of texts in electronic format. 

I would like to introduce DOIS (Documents in Information Scients) , it is an efort of some volunteers to put together scientist specialized texts, which still now where non linked. They pretend to select the information from valid sources to create a virtual scientific library: 

“DoIS is a database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the area of Library and Information Science. DoIS is a volunteer effort to create a free bibliographic resource of scientific texts specialized in Information Science.”

You can also participate: “The used system is the one that facilitates RcLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) based on a distributed architecture in which the work of description of documents is distributed between a set of institutions.” They will help you to insert your documents, thesis or resources in the data base by linking in  - Step by step instruction for RcLIS contributors -  

Debate: Hablar, leer, oír leer y bloguear

Tradicionalmente las formas de comunicación se han dividido en oral y escrita (wikipedia), aunque recientemente debido a la influencia de las nuevas tecnologías, los límites entre entre ambas se van haciendo más difusas. (Annete Becker, “lenguaje escrito versus lenguaje oral”).
Algunas diferencias entre la comunicación oral, escrita y digital son:

• Desde el punto de vista del receptor, la comunicación oral es para ser oída, la escrita para ser leída y la digital para ser ojeada.
• El lenguaje oral tiene mayor capacidad apelativa que el texto escrito y digital, por su sencillez, entonación y mímica que nos ayuda a expresarnos con mayor exactitud. (Wikipedia – “comunicación oral”) .
• El lenguaje escrito y sobre todo el digital han tenido más prestigio que el oral debido a que requieren un proceso de aprendizaje de la gramática y de la tecnología. (L. A. Díaz – “Lenguaje escrito y lenguaje oral”).
• La principal novedad del lenguaje digital es el hipertexto que rompe con la linealidad e implica al lector en la expresión del contenido, cuyo resultado siempre es incierto. ( “Escritura espacial” – J.D. Bolter).
• El hipertexto se basa en el pensamiento asociativo y el texto impreso utiliza el pensamiento lógico casual. (Espéculo, UCM).

Toda escritura es un modo de tecnología, la escritura electrónica sólo es la última etapa de la evolución de las tecnologías de la escritura. (McLuhan).