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Introduction
Language technology introduction
Language technology focuses on the automatic processing and
applying of natural language. It is a discipline that has acquired its own place in
the world of ICT. Speech technology focuses specifically on the analysis
and production (synthesis) of spoken language. It is often referred to with the
umbrella term language and speech technology. This is a multidisciplinary field
that is influenced by linguistics, computer science, psychology and statistics.
Language technology is a very broad field of research; this workbench only
gives a very brief introduction that is in line with the research of the
faculty's Computational Lexicology research group. The Instruments
section provides an overview of various methods that are used in this field.
Some of these instruments are used in our faculty for automatic (text) corpus
analysis. The Applications
section briefly describes a number of important applications of language
technology.
There is a lot of literature on this topic. Below are a number of suggestions
for those who want to know more about language technology.
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Kennislink hosts a popular-scientific themed website about language and speech technology
.
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On the CLIN website(Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands), you can find links
to conferences and literature to get an impression of various key topics in this field.
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In the online publication Van rekenmachine tot taalautomaat (by Leonoor van
der Beek) you can find information about the history of the language and speech technology in Netherlands and Flanders.
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The online publication Computational linguistics: models, resources, applications by Igor A. Bolshakov and
Alexander Gelbukh contains a comprehensive introduction to computational linguistics and automatic language processing, which is approached as a
combination of linguistics and artificial intelligence.
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In the VU University Library you can find the book Speech and language
processing: an introduction to natural language processing, computational
linguistics, and speech recognition by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin
(2nd ed., 2009; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall). This is a
comprehensive introduction to the field. More information.
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The Dutch Language Union sends out a bimonthly electronic newsletter that reports developments in
language and speech technology in the Netherlands and Flanders.
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The open-access journal Linguistic issues in Language Technology publishes
articles that address the cross-pollination between linguistic research and language technology.
