What is Language Technology?

Answer 1

Language technology is often called Human Language Technology (HLT) and consists of computational linguistics (or 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..

Answer 2

With the advent of personal computers during 1970’s, Indian scientists felt dire need for use of Indian languages in computers. During 1980’s distributed computer networking paved way towards emergence of Internet - an information revolution. At the dawn of 21 st century, Interspace - the next generation of Internet, opens up opportunities for new socio-economic models for the emerging knowledge-based society, global village, and democratization of creativity. This necessitates communication overcoming language barrier and also access to multilingual information in natural modes of queries. Technology advances very fast whereas many linguistic communities lag far and far behind as the time passes. This results into sprawling digital divide. Is the technology to divide or to Unite ? India was aware of the technological challenges and the local constraints. Development of language technology in India may be categorized in three phases. During A-Technology Phase (1971-1990), focus was on Adaptation technologies; abstraction of requisite technological designs and competence building in R&D institutions. During B-Technology Phase (1991-2000), focus was on developing Basic technologies, generic information processing tools, interface technologies and cross-compatibility conversion uilities. During this phase, TDIL (TechnologyDevelopment for Indian Languages) Programme was initiated.










There had been major advancements after invention of the writing system five millennia ago, followed by another invention of writing a book in 1300 BC and subsequently invention of Gutenberg’s Printing Press in 1450 AD. New information revolution commenced in 1950, and further spurred with the introduction of personal computer (PC) in 1971. With the rapid proliferation of PCs and exponential increase in bandwidth capacity, the distances shrank, the information flow increased, but non-uniform participation of diverse communities resulted into sprawling digital divide. Latin alphabet based users consisting of 39% of World population enjoy 84% of Internet access, whereas Bramhi based scripts users in south-east Asia and SAARC countries having 22% of the world population have just 0.3% of Internet access. At the UNESCO level there is experts committee on multilingualism and universal access deliberating these issues. In this context India’s efforts are noteworthy to develop language technology in collaborative mode for all constitutionally recognized Indian languages. For major Indian languages, there is a remarkable success in developing language technologies such as open type fonts, basic information processing tools, text-editor, spell checker, dictionaries, OCR system, Machine Translation System, Indian language enabling of LINUX OS, Text-to-Speech, etc. In academia the R&D work have been rather skewed, because of lack of emphasis on prototyping and testing in the real life situations. In order to promote the participation of industry, Consortium of Indian Language Technologies (COIL-Tech) was formed with the secretariat at MAIT. This consortium provides platform for interaction with Government, Academia & Industry in the field of language technology. COIL-Tech brought out the language technology market analysis report highlighting the demand. Industry involvement in developing countries for nonexporting high-tech activities is difficult. Hence promotional efforts and incentive schemes need to be worked out