Language Technology
Language Technology covers those various aspects of making computers do useful
things with ordinary language, written or spoken. bymouth's major focus is on
spoken language (and such applications are covered elsewhere on this web site)
but the skills of the business mean it is also familiar with the other
area in which Language Technology can help.
These fall into three main classes:
Machine Translation
It is now possible to achieve useful levels of automatic translation. In the immediate
future highly effective automatic translation of the main European Languages should be achieved
under the pressure of the EU to achieve a solution to the multi-lingual nature
of European Institutions assisted by the common roots of most European Languages.
The babel-fish lies somewhat further in the future but as processing speeds advance
and computer memory increases effective automatic translation of all the main human languages
will come about.
Question Answering Systems
Most of bymouth's applications are Question Answering Systems in the spoken language domain.
Of course similar technology can allow a more natural interface with the Internet and databases
generally. These interfaces allow untrained users to ask questions and for the computer to
craft natural replies.
Text Summarisation
The Internet has seen an explosion in the amount of written material. Computer can now
assist in summarizing such information allowing less human input time for assimilation.
Document Retrieval
Language technology allows the use of keywords as a method of discovering which documents
may be relevant to a person. These techniques can be refined to pinpoint particular
parts of a document which may contain the answers a person is lloking for.