European Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies
What Language and Communication Technologies are
Language is widely recognized as part of what makes us human, and we instinctively know its value in communication and in the development of ideas. However, transferring those skills to computers has been anything but easy.
That is the challenge of Language and Communication Technologies, a dynamic discipline which joins Linguistics and Computer Science.
Language technologies are information technologies that are specialized for dealing with human language. Therefore these technologies are also often subsumed under the term Human Language Technology. Human language occurs in spoken and written form. Whereas speech is the oldest and most natural mode of language communication, complex information and most of human knowledge is maintained and transmitted in written texts. Speech and text technologies process or produce language in these two modes of realization. But language also has aspects that are shared between speech and text such as dictionaries, most of grammar and the meaning of sentences. Thus large parts of language technology cannot be subsumed under speech and text technologies. Among those are technologies that link language to knowledge. We do not know how language, knowledge and thought are represented in the human brain. Nevertheless, language technology had to create formal representation systems that link language to concepts and tasks in the real world. This provides the interface to the fast growing area of knowledge technologies.
In our communication we mix language with other modes of communication and other information media. We combine speech with gesture and facial expressions. Digital texts are combined with pictures and sounds. Movies may contain language and spoken and written form. Thus speech and text technologies overlap and interact with many other technologies that facilitate processing of multimodal communication and multimedia documents. In this respect, the investigation and modelling of human language is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor. That is, the methods of language technology come from several disciplines: computer science, computational and theoretical linguistics, mathematics, electrical engineering and psychology.
As such, language and communication technologies occupy a central position in research and education in Europe. They are the key enabling technologies for numerous applications related to the information society, including multilingual document production and management, intelligent web search and semantic web, voice control of electronic equipment, automated dialog, and language learning. The market is growing rapidly, although the shortage of qualified researchers and developers is slowing down the speed of innovation in Europe.