FEMTI

The Framework for Machine Translation Evaluation in ISLE is an effort to organize the various methods that are used to evaluate MT systems (machine translation systems), and to relate them to the purpose and context of the systems. Therefore, FEMTI is made of two interrelated classifications or taxonomies. The first classification helps evaluators to define an intended context of use for the MT system to evaluate. After that each feature is linked to relevant quality characteristics and metrics, defined in the second classification.

     

       FEMTI contains: A classification of the main features defining the context of use that is: the type of user of the MT system, the type of task the system is used for, and the nature of the input to the system. Also contains a classification of the MT software quality characteristics, into hierarchies of sub-characteristics, with internal and/or external attributes (i.e., metrics) at the bottom level. The upper levels match the ISO/IEC 9126 characteristics. And finally contains a mapping from the first classification to the second, which defines or suggests the quality characteristics, sub-characteristics and attributes/metrics that are relevant to each context of use.

      

        FEMTI helps People who want to use an MT system. They can select the quality characteristics that are most important to them and in this manner choose the MT system that best suits these characteristics. People who want to compare several MT systems are also helped by FEMTI. They can browse and select the characteristics that best reflect their circumstances, and thereby find associated evaluation measures and tests. People who want to design a new MT system or to upgrade an old one are helped too. They can learn about the requirements of users and find applications for their system.

Reasons to study Human Language Technologies

Automatic transcription of meetings, translation between languages (e.g.  Babel Fish), automatic answering of questions, text mining or acess to information through spoken human-computer dialogue… Human Language Technologies are everywhere in our society  Mobile phones or web pages use this new technology, “consequently, there is strong demanded for graduates with the highly-specialised multi-disciplinary skills thatare required in HTL applications and as researches into the advanced capabilities required for next-generation HTL system.”

• “Create sofware products that have some knowledge of human language´´.  As Uskoreit says the most important idea is to create machines which are able to comunicate with people.
• Having a wide range of areas to work. Also, lots of posibilities of finding a job.
• “Become acquainted with new technologies applied to natural languages. “This will help the knowledge of the language that you use.

There are much more. For instance, here we have a list of the objectives for our subject on Human Language Tecnologies. The main objective is to create machines that can speak and listen so they can help us to comunicate.

Some concepts in connection with Machine Translation

Machine Translation: sometimes referred to by the acronym MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level, MT performs simple substitution of words in one natural language for words in another. Using corpus techniques, more complex translations may be attempted, allowing for better handling of differences in linguistic typology, phrase recognition, and translation of idioms, as well as the isolation of anomalies.

Machine aided translation:Section has covered Machine Translation (MT), where translation proper is performed by a computer, even if the human helps by preediting, postediting, or answering questions to disambiguate the source text. In Computer-Aided Translation, or more precisely Machine-Aided Human Translation (MAHT), by contrast, translation is performed by a human, and the computer offers supporting tools.

Translation Technologhy: here, the text´s interpretation is the most important thing and when it is created again, it is metacreated.

International Meetings of HTL

Once we have learnt what means Human Language Technologies and read what some professionals say on the subject, it is worth talking about meetings and conferences on HLT:

• 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held in Prague (June 23rd-30th.)
• Human Language Technology Conference 2007, in Rochester (NY.)
• XXIII Congreso de la SEPLN, in Spain (10th, 11th and 12th Septembre 2007.)

These three are ofthe best and most remarkable examples of meetings on our subject. Placed in different and opposite locations (Prague, EEUU and Spain), these conferences are perfect occasions to learn more, through scholars, about Human Language Technologies.

Each conference’s website offers information about accomodation, organization, other events…

European Research Centres

• OFAI 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). OFAI

• Language Tecnology Group, Edinbourgh: 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. LTG
  • Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland: 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. FiLT
  • National Centre for Languages Technologies (Dublin): Language is the key modality in communication. The National Centre for Language Technology 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. DCU

Hans Uszkoreit

Hans Uszkoreit is a computacional linguistic in Saarbrücken (Germany) ; there he works not only as a teacher in the university of Saarland but also as a  cientific director of German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence-en (DFKI). He is a member of two companies which are in relation with language technology. Actually, he is the co-founder and an adviser too. He studied Linguistics in Berlin and Computer Sciences in Austin , university of Texas. In 1986 he joined IBM from Germany.
In 1988an, he started working on Computacional Linguistics in the university of Saarland. There, he went on with  Departament of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics , in which he worked very hard.

He is also a permanent memberof International Comitee of Computationals Linguistics.

Nowadays doubts are the understanding of the natural language, the production of computers, languages’ and knowledges’ developed application…