Proceedings of ALTSS/ALTW, Melbourne, December 2003
As the dominance and linguistic imperialism of English begins to wane, and applications of language technology reach a certain maturity, researchers are now turning their attention to languages which have previously received less attention. This includes both local indigenous languages and the non-indigenous languages of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, but also the languages of countries with emerging economies. In this talk, we will address some of the business and social motivations for focusing on these minority languages, describing some of the areas in which machine translation can be applied, such as language provision in public health and social services and "localisation" in relation to commercial enterprises.
Harold Somers is Professor of Language Engineering at UMIST (Manchester). With over 25 years' experience in the field both as a researcher and educator, he is editor of one of the field's premier journals (Machine Translation), and has written extensively on the subject. His latest publication "Computers and Translation" (John Benjamins, 2003) promises to become an influential and useful addition to the literature. [http://www.ccl.umist.ac.uk/staff/harold/]
While the surge in interest in computational linguistics reflects the wide range of its possible technological applications, the field also offers a unique perspective on important scientific questions concerning the nature of human language. I'll discuss in particular the Chomsky vs Shannon debate about statistical models and "rich representations", and argue that recently developed methods point the way toward a novel synthesis of these two views.
Mark Johnson is Professor of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and Computer Science at Brown University, and current president of the Association for Computational Linguistics. He has made significant contributions to research into computational processes involved in human language understanding, and is at the forefront of research in statistical natural language processing. [http://www.cog.brown.edu/~mj/]