Diferences between:

• Machine Translation: also known by the acronyms MT, it is a sub-field of computational linguistics. It works on translating texts or speeches from one natural language to another. Basically, MT performssimple substitution of words, but it can also use a more complex translation which allows fifferences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition and translation of idioms.
• Machine Aided Human Translation: also known as MAHT, translation is not performed by the machine, but by the human, who uses the computer just as a supporting element.
• Multilingual Content Managemen:  (MCM) contains information including audio clips, video clips and images. This content is managed in several languages.
• Translation Technology: this term coveres all the new methos for a machine translation nowadays.

The main diference between these concepts is the way or the techniques they use to translate. Machine translation is done basically by computers (automatically), however, it can be just a support (some help) for a professional translator.

Main Characteristics of a translation task according to FEMTI report

FEMTI (Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE) divides the characteristics of translation in two different groups:

• the external: those which can be observed when the system is working
• the internal: those which pertrain to the internal static properties of the software

A FEMTI translation machine has the followings characteristics:

1.  Functionality: accuaracy, suitability, well-formedness,  interoparability, funtionability compliance and security.
2. Reliability: maturity, fault tolerance, crashing frequency, recoverabilitu and reliability compliance.
3. Usability: understandability, learnability, operability, documentation, attractiveness,  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-existance.
7. Cost: introduction cost, maintenance cost and other costs.

*The definitions of each characteristic can be seen clicking on them.

International meetings on Computational Linguistics

This year, we are going to have many chances to attend to conferences about HLT or Computational Linguistics. These acts are the best way to learn about the new subject.

Here there are some details about conferences of 2007:

• Association for Computational Linguistics 2007:

ACL 2007 will take place in Prague (Czech Republic), June 23^rd–30^th 2007. During those days, Prague will be invaded  by conferences, tutorials( Textual Entailment, Bayesian Nonparametric Structured Models…) and workshops (parising technology,Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing…) about HLT.

• Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2007:

“Human Language Technologies: The Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-HLT 2007) will be held in Rochester, NY, April 22-27, 2007.

• XXIII Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural.

The Spanish city of Sevilla, will recibe the 23^rd Natural Language Processing edition. The days 10, 11 and 12 of September will be full of different activities as automatic translation, industrial applications of HLT….

Some reasons to study HLT

Due to the great advance that new technologies have suffered these last twenty years, learning how to use a computer has become essential to live in our modern society. That is why a new subject called HLT (Human Language Technology) has taken place in some studies, such as languages, engineering or psychology.

Here we are some more reasons to study HLT:

• Improving comunication between people using computers
• A help for language scholars to progress in their careers (lately, there is a strong demand for graduates with skills that are required in HLT)
• Improve relation between men and machine
• It is a good way for those who are interested on investigation.

Hans Uszkoreit

This HLT master is Professor of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University. He works for some different institutions: on the one hand, he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he heads the DFKI Language Technology Laboratory by cooptation. On the other hand, he is Professor of the Computer Science Department. Apart from that, H. Uszkoreit is also involved in two young language technology enterprises as co-funder and advisor.

Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science in two different universities: at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. During his time in Austin he also worked as a research in a large machine translation project at the Linguistics Research Center.

Recent Publications:

• Uszkoreit, H. F. Xu, W. Liu (to appear) 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.
• Uszkoreit, H., F. Xu, Weiquan Liu, J. Steffen, I. Aslan, J. Liu, C. Müller, B. Holtkamp, M. Wojciechowski (to appear)
  A Successful Field Test of a Mobile and Multilingual Information Service System COMPASS2008. In Proceedings of HCI International 2007, 12th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Beijing, 2007.
• Uszkoreit, H. (2004) New Chances for Deep Linguistic Processing. In: Chu-Ren Huang (Eds.) (“Frontiers in Computational Linguistics” in English), Shangwu Press Beijing 2004 (also in as Keynote Lecture in: Proceedings of COLING 2002, Taipei).

Definitions for HLT

According to HLTC ( Human Language Technology Centre, in Hong Kong), the mission of this new cientific-humanistic area is “lead state-of-the-art research directions that drive the development of new applications in both text and spoken language technology”.

The definition found in Language Technology World is the next one: “(HLT), is the cover term for all information technologies specialized for dealing with text and speech in human language. It is also the field of engineering in which LT methods and applications are developed. “

The group of HLT from Meraka Institute in Africa, on the other hand, does not give us a certain definition, but it explains what it can be useful for:

• ” Human Language Technology (HLT) makes it easier for people to interact with machines”
• “HLT as an enabling technology that can play a crucial role in addressing the need for information empowerment. An example is telephone-based systems using HLT that can provide much useful information.”
• “HLT as a support for language diversity in an affordable and equitable fashion. HLT can assist industry and government to make services and documents available in the 11 official languages and has a role to play in rectifying the historical discrimination against specific languages.”

Metadatos

Por primera vez en mi vida, en esta asignatura de Nuevas Teconogías me hablaron de los metadatos. La verdad es que me costó bastante familiarizarme con este nuevo concepto informático.
Aún asi, intenaté dar unas definiciones de lo que son los metadatos:
- datos (información) que nos aportan información sobre otros datos al mismo tiempo
- además, también nos facilitan la ubicación de otros datos.
- describen el contenido de una página
- son una herramienta muy útil a la hora de organizar la información

También sé que que el lenguaje HTML está compuesto por metadatos, y que éste es el lenguaje básico de los textos informáticos.

De todas maneras, todavía me queda mucho por aprender sobre este submundo informático ( digo submundo porque los metadatos hasta ahora los he encontrado escondidos de alguna manera). Espero que la prómima vez que escriba un artículo sobre este tema pueda aportar más información.

Oralidad, palabras y sonidos

Cuando hablamos de oralidad nos referimos a cualquier sonido que nosotros, los seres humanos, emitimos  oralmente. Puede ser un discurso, un simple saludo o incluso una carcajada.

 La cuestión que me planteo es que la oralidad no siempre adquiere un significado concreto, como puede ser el de las palabras. Cuando decimos “mesa´´, a todos nos viene la misma imagen a la mente, es decir, la imagen de un objeto compuesto por una tabla con cuatro patas. Pero si damos un grito, no obtenemos ningun significado simbólico, sólo se pueden plantear razones o motivos para haber gritado.

 Entonces, ¿dónde empieza la oralidad a definirse como lenguaje? Una profesora de lengua me dijo hace tiempo que las palabras son símbolos con un significado y un significante. De esa afirmación puedo deducir que cualquier sonido oral que emitimos con un significado universal se denomina “palabra´´. El resto de los sonidos no sé en qué saco meterlos, podrían ser medios para expresar sentimientos cuyo significado es personal y está en función del emisor y lo  que éste o ésta quiera dar a entender al receptor.

ONE MORE STEP TOWARDS THE “META´´

A new challenge has been proposed to us, to people who more or less know how to manage these new kind of tecnologies because we don’t have any idea about the term “metadata´´ itself.

As far as we have researched, we are able to give some definitions or meanings about this term:

- CONTENTS: it’s a group that contains every part of a unit.

- DATA: a simbolic representation of chracteristics of a unit. The data itself has no sense, but it can be used to calculate. it’s very usual in computer science.

- METACONTENTS: it’s an information related to the content of a document, such as tittle, author, the size of the files, date of publication, historical changes, etc. The metacontent can be used to search information and administer.

- METADATA: we are talking about high structured data which describe information, the content, the quality, the condition and some other characteristics.

Some examples that can be used with
- metadata: audiovisual iformation, geospacial and printed.
- metacontents and metadata: work in digital edition to identify the author, to search for information and to study in depth.

Nuevas Tecnologías

Las nuevas tecnologías en el campo de la literatura están causando un cambio notable a la hora de escribir, publicar y leer una obra.

Las posibilidades que ofrecen estos medios son numerosas:

• interactividad
• facilidad de correción de faltas
• posibilidad de añadir fotos e imágenes
• introducción de sonido

Todo esto nos proporciona comodidad, ya que cuesta menos redactar un texto (hipertexto) directamente en el ordenador que escribirlo, revisarlo y finalmente editarlo. Además, en este último caso, una vez editada la obra no hay posobilidad de corrección o modificación de la misma, a no ser que se edite una vez más.

El soporte informático está cobrando cada vez más fuerza debido a sus ventajas. El mundo de las lenguas y la información ha encontrado un vía, mejor dicho, una autovía para expandirse y desarrollarse en campos que hasta hace poco casi ni se conocían.