Language Technology Group (LTG)
Language Technology comprises theoretical and applied Informatics that seeks to enable computers to ‘make sense’ of human language.
Language Technology is at the interface of Computer Science, Linguistics, and Psychology. Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are closely related names for this region of overlap between the disciplines. We say Language Technology because the term emphasizes the applied nature of our research, that is we are specifically interested in methods and technologies that are sufficiently scalable (and ultimately engineered to a sufficient degree) to enable practical demonstrations of our research.
With a short history going back to code cracking efforts around World War II, some ‘classic’ Language Technology applications are Machine Translation (enabling computers to translate from one language into another one) and various kinds of dialogue systems—for example voice interfaces to controlling complex in-car electronics. With the advent of massive on-line repositories of natural language content (e.g. the World-Wide Web), problems of search (or retrieval) and information extraction have gained rapidly increasing interest in the past decades. The concept of a semantic web is a viable vision; expecting, however, that large-scale semantic structuring of on-line content will be achieved fully manually—by human authors or editors—would seem overly optimistic. Web-scale semantic parsing—language technology in pursuit of its ultimate scientific goal, text understanding—will be a prerequisite to realization of the semantic web.