What is Language Technology?
by Hans 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. Although existing LT systems are far from achieving human ability, they have numerous possible applications. The goal is to create software products that have some knowledge of human language. Such products are going to change our lives. They are urgently needed for improving human-machine interaction since the main obstacle in the interaction beween human and computer is a communication problem. Today’s computers do not understand our language but computer languages are difficult to learn and do not correspond to the structure of human thought.
