Main characteristics of a translation task according to the FEMTI report

According to FEMTI’s web “the Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE is a resource that helps MT evaluators define contextual evaluation plans. FEMTI consists of two interrelated classifications or taxonomies: the first one lists possible characteristics of the contexts of use that are applicable to MT systems. The second one lists the possible characteristics of an MT system, along with the metrics that were proposed to measure them.”

 The characteristics of the translation task are those who refer to “the information flow intended for the output, from the point of view of the agent (human or otherwise) who receives the translation.” Here, there is a brief definition of each one of these characteristics:

• Assimilation: “The ultimate purpose of the assimilation task (of which translation forms a part) is to monitor a (relatively) large volume of texts produced by people outside the organization, in (usually) several languages.”

• Dissemination: “The ultimate purpose of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization.”

• Communication: “The ultimate purpose of the communication task is to support multi-turn dialogues between people who speak different languages. The translation quality must be high enough for painless conversation, despite possible syntactically ill-formed input and idiosyncratic word and format usage. The ultimate purpose of dissemination is to deliver to others a translation of documents produced inside the organization.”

All this information has been taken from the same page.

Reasons to study HLT

Human Language Technologies are growing up notably in the last years. As always happens, when something new arrives to us with an incredibly success, there is a kind of need to learn working with it because of its usefullness. So, there are some reasons to study the new HLT:

According to the Department of Computer Science of The University of Sheffield we should learn them because “the capabilities of human language technology (HLT) have grown substantially in recent years, both in the research laboratory and in the commercial marketplace. There is now a wide range of applications for HLT systems such as automatic transcription of meetings, translation between languages (e.g. Arabic and English), automatic answering of questions, text mining (e.g. from the web) and access to information through spoken human-computer dialogue. Systems which use HLT are now in everyday use, through technologies such as internet search engines and mobile phones, and most major international computer and telecoms companies now engage in HLT research and development. As a result, there is strong demand for graduates with the highly-specialised multi-disciplinary skills that are required in HLT, both as practitioners in the development of HLT applications and as researchers into the advanced capabilities required for next-generation HLT systems.

The Masters course in Human Language Technology has been carefully tailored to meet this training need, by providing a balanced programme of instruction across a range of relevant disciplines including speech processing, computational linguistics/natural language processing and machine learning. The course aims to give the student a solid grounding in the principles underlying HLT as well as an understanding of a variety of current HLT applications.”

“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. Even if the language the machine understands and its domain of discourse are very restricted, the use of human language can increase the acceptance of software and the productivity of its users. ” by Hans Uszkoreit

International meetings on Computational Linguistics

In the following months there will be some International meetings on Computatiobal Linguistics. Now, I’m going to mention some of them:

Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China: “The International Conference on Computational Science 2007 (ICCS 2007) aims to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.”

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and on Computational Natural Language Learning on June 28-30, 2007 in Prague, Czech Republic: ”The focus of the joint conference is learned models and data-driven systems concerning all aspects of human language. Both empirical and theoretical results are welcome.” “The 3-day conference will be held in Prague during the 3 workshop days following the ACL 2007 main conference. Registration and accommodations are kindly being handled by ACL 2007, so please visit their website if you plan to attend.”

Human Language Technology Conference NAACL in Rochester, NY, April 22-27 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. The conference site will be the Hyatt Regency in downtown Rochester.”

Conference of Natural Language Procesing in Sevilla, Spain, September 10-12 2007: The XXIII edition of the Anual Congress of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN) will be hold in Sevilla from 10 to 12 September 2007.

Zer egin ez

Ez dakit zer egin. Horrela daramat arratsalde osoa. Eguraldia ez da oso egokia, beraz kalera irteteko gogorik handirik ez dut. Eguna pasatzen doa; ez dakit nola, ez baitut ezer egin arratsalde osoan: jan, siesta, musika pixka bat entzun, pixka bat irakurri, pixka bat messengerrean; ordenagailutik logelara, logelatik saloira: zer egin ez. Ba horrela daramat arratsalde osoa, ezer konkreturik egin gabe.

Beno, orain bai. Orain probetxuko zerbait egingo dut: Abaituarentzako artikulu bat idatzi dut. Espero dut gaur afaldu baino lehen HLT-ei buruzko artikulu bat publikatu izatea.

European research centres for HLT

In this article I am going to mentioned some European research centres for Human Language Technologies.

“The Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG) is a research and development group that has been working in the area of natural language engineering since the early 1990s. The LTG was originally established as part of the Human Communication Research Centre, and is now based in the Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems of the Division of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, one of the largest communities of natural language processing specialists in Europe.”

Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland (FiLT): “This site is being developed by and maintained by the Department of General Linguistics in the University of Helsinki. The Nordic language technology documentation project was financed partly by the Nordic Language Technology Research Program administered by NorFA, which later became NordForsk.”

The National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) ”conducts research into the processing of human language by computers, such as speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, human-computer interfaces, information retrieval and extraction, the teaching and learning of languages using computers and software localisation and globalisation. Research in Human Language Technology (HLT) is interdisciplinary and includes Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Linguistics (CL). HLT has substantial economic implications and potential. The centre carries out basic research and develops applications.”

OFAI Language Technology Group: “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. This includes constructing linguistic resources (such as lexicons, grammars, discourse models), processing algorithms (such as morphological components, parsers, generators, speech synthesizers, discourse processing components), and application prototypes (such as natural language interfaces, advisory systems and concept-to-speech systems).”

Hans Uszkoreit

“I am a computational linguist in Saarbrücken, Germany working as Professor at Saarland University and as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). I am also involved in two young language technology enterprises as co-founder and advisor.” says Hans Uszkoreit in his own page.

Hans Uszkoreit estarted to study Linguistics in 1973 and he finished in 1977. He got a graduate in Linguistics in 1981 at The University of Texas at Austin, and after that, he got his Ph.D. in 1984 in Linguistics in the same university.

He was working as a computer scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International in Menlo Park from 1982 to 1986. “During this time he was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University as a senior researcher and later as a project leader. In 1986 he spent six months in Stuttgart on an IBM Research Fellowship at the Science Division of IBM Germany. In December 1986 he returned to Stuttgart to work for IBM Germany as a project leader in the project LILOG (Linguistic and Logical Methods for the Understanding of German Texts). During this time, he also taught at the University of Stuttgart.“

“In 1988 Uszkoreit was appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. In 1989 he became the head of the newly founded Language Technology Lab at  DFKI. He has been a co-founder and principal investigator of the Special Collaborative Research Division (SFB 378) “Resource-Adaptive Cognitive Processes” of the DFG (German Science Foundation). He is also co-founder and professor of the “European Postgraduate Program Language Technology and Cognitive Systems”, a joint Ph.D. program with the University of Edinburgh.”

“Uszkoreit is Permanent Member of the International Committee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL), Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, Member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech, and serves on several international editorial and advisory boards.  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.”

Sources: hans.uszkoreit.net, Maider’s blog and http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/%7Ehansu/bio.html

DEFINITIONS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGIES

In this second semestre I have a new subject: Human Language Technologies. First of all, I must know what this term means, so I’ll start searching some definitions.

“Human Language Technology (HLT) consists of computational linguistics (CL) and speech technology as its core but includes also many application oriented aspects of them. Language technology is closely connected to computer science and general linguistics.” (A definition taken from wikipedia)

“The overall objective of HLT is to support e-business in a global context and to promote a human centred infostructure ensuring equal access and usage opportunities for all. This is to be achieved by developing multilingual technologies and demonstrating exemplary applications providing features and functions that are critical for the realisation of a truly user friendly Information Society. Projects address generic and applied RTD from a multi- and cross-lingual perspective, and undertake to demonstrate how language specific solutions can be transferred to and adapted for other languages.” (Information taken from ISTweb | KA3 |)

“Human Language Technologies (HLT) is a new term that embraces a wide range of areas of research and development in the sphere of what used to be called Language Technologies or Language Engineering. The aim of this module is to familiarise the student with selected key areas of HLT.”(A definition taken from ICTL4LT Module 3.5)

During the next months, I’ll be working with the Human Language Technologies

Group E – Metadata & Metacontents

enero 12th, 2007 at 1:55 pm (IST)

A piece of information -for example the number 16086364- given out of a context is meaningless. It is necessary something more about that data in order to understand that the content represents one individual’s ID card, and that is what we call metadata. This concept of metadata is very interesting in a variety of fields of computer science.

There are some definitions needed so as to understand accurately what all these terms mean on the whole:

• Data: in a very large sense, it refers to “numbers, characters, images or other outputs from devices to convert physical quantities into symbols processed by a human or input into a computer or transmitted to another human or computer”. Data processing occurs by stages -from raw data to processed data (Wikipedia, visited: 01/12/2007).

• Metadata: the most common and specific definition for the term is “data about data“, that could be developed as “structured, encoded data that describe characteristics of information-bearing entities to aid in the identification, discovery, assessment, and management of the described entities” (Wikipedia, visited: 01/12/2007).

• Content: referring to computing, it means “the ’stuff’ that makes up a website“, such as words, pictures, images or sounds. In other words, “the ‘information’ a website provides” (Web-Designz.com, visited: 01/12/2007).

• Metacontent: it is the information relating to the document’s content, such as its title, author, size, date, changes-history, key words…, etc. A metacontent can be used for searching and leaking information, and administering documents (Joaquín Bravo Montero, visited: 01/12/2007).

A metalanguage, in computing terms, refers to the programming languages developed for computers to process data and information. Three examples of these are:

1. HTML (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/).
2. XML (http://www.w3.org/XML/).
3. SGML (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/).

The new Internet, the Web 2.0, offers us endless possibilities, but there is something missing – in words of W3C platform “a part of the Web which contains information about information – labeling, cataloging and descriptive information structured in such a way that allows Web pages to be properly searched and processed in particular by computers. In other words, what is now very much needed on the Web is metadata“.

Gloria Mundi liburuari buruz

Pasaden urtean Gloria Mundi liburua irakurri nuen. Beno, egia esanda ez nuen bukatu, “coñazo” hutsa zen eta. Ikastolan agindu zidaten, eta esaldi bat baino ez zitzaidan gustatu: “Gizon askea da bere pentsamenduaren mugaraino joateko beldur ez den hura”.

 Bai, esaldi hori izugarri gustatu zitzaidan. Egia esanda, ez dakit zergatik; baina gogoratzen dut nola irakurri nuenean liburuari begira eta pentsatzen geratu nintzen. “Gizon askea da bere pentsamenduaren mugaraino joateko beldur ez den hura”… agian arrazoia duelako? Nire ustez esaldi horrek diona egia da; niri gehien izutzen nauena nire pentsaerak dira eta. Behar bada badakizu gauza konkretu bati beldur diozun ala ez, baina noizbait galdetu zara ea zure pentsamenduen beldur zaren?

Esaldi honek filosofoentzako izan daiteke, buruari hainbat buelta eman eta gero ez baitut ondo ulertzen.

Baina beno, denok jakin dezazuen liburu osotik nire gustoko gauza bakarra hau izan zela.

Liburu hau ez diot inori gomendatzen. Gainera ni ez naiz zientzietakoa eta liburu honek fisika, kimika eta nik ulertzen ditudan gauzei buruz baino ez du hitz egiten.

Karate

Karate is a martial art. Karate means “empty hand” (in japanease kara means “empty” an te means “hand”). That´s because it is an art in which there are no weapons.

It is both an ancient and a young martial art. It is ancient because his roots are deeply entrenched in the past, and young because it is less than a hundred years.

In karate there are some different styles, and some of the most known and practised are Wado Ryu and Shotokan. I am going to talk about shotokan since it is my style.Its founder was Gichin Funakoshi. Shoto was the pen name of Funakoshi and kan means “school”, so shotokan´s meaning would be “the school of Funakoshi”. Shotokan is a “hard style” because of its long, low stances, its powerful techniques and its dynamics forms.

Shotokan karate is built on what are known as “triads”, which are both real organizations and metaphors for something much deeper within the human psyche. There exist the physical triad of kihon (techniques), kumite (combat) and kata ( a serie of techniques with a stablished order in which you fight with imaginary opponents), which require dedicated training and the constant perfecting of the technique. This is followed by the moral triad of justice, mercy and compassion and finally by the ethical triad of duty, honour and loyalty. If you put all of the nine triad principles together (nine symbolizes perfection) you achieve the hole, rounded person. When this principles are practised in a martial art, they illustrate one of the fundamental concepts of shotokan karate, as advocated for the founder, Gichin Funakoshi. His aim was to focus on the developement of the human character as a whole being, rather than on winning or losing. Karate exists to perfect the individual, to produce men and women who are just, compassionate and honorable members of society, people who recognize injustice and justice.

While karate is a wonderful form of relaxation or sport for many people, for those who pratise it seriously it has a much wider and deeper significance. But this deeper realization comes only after years of dedicated practice.