eVikings II

WP3: Language Technologies

HLT

• Human Language Technologies (HLT) play a crucial role in the Information Society

• For small languages it is a question of survival - in next 100 years 50-90% of languages will be dying out (Atlas of the World Languages in Danger of Disappearing, UNESCO 2001)

WP3: HLT

Objective of WP3 is supporting of HLT research in Estonia by development of:– human resources– material resources (research infrastructure)– re-usable language resources– software

How?

HLT in Estonia

Laboratory of Phonetics and Speech Technology at

IOC

Computer Linguistics’ group at the Tartu

University

HLT group at the Institute of Estonian Language

Written language

Spoken language

Research activities

• UT: text corpora, morphologic, syntactic and semantic analysis, dialogue modelling

• IEL: text corpora, electronic dictionaries, morphologic analysis, text-to-speech synthesis

• IOC: phonetics, speech corpora, text-to-speech synthesis, speech and speaker recognition

Re-usable language resources

Algorithms and

techniques

HLT progress

Re-usable language resources

Algorithms Algorithms and and

techniquestechniques mature for mature for applicationsapplications

Many products

and services

EU languages:

Re-usable language resources

Algorithms Algorithms and and

techniques techniques under developmentunder development

Few products

and services

Estonian:

LANGUAGE PORTAL

http://ee.www.ee

ELECTRONIC DICTIONARIES

WP 3 goals• Enhancement of language resources and

infrastructure

CORPORA:text

speechdialogue

multilingual

Language resources

WP 3 goals• Integration of research groups

Laboratory of Phonetics and

Speech Technology at IOC

Computer Linguistics’

group at the Tartu

University HLT group at the Institute of Estonian

Language

Co-ordinatedresearch program

Sharing resources

Sharingpeople

WP 3 goals• Strengthening academy-industry collaboration

Potential partners:• EMT

• Ericsson

• Estonian Legal Translation Centre

• European Language Resources Association

• Microsoft

• Xerox

• Zi Corporation

• Babel Technologies & Telia Research

• ...

WP 3 goals• Improving human resources

Activities:• involve graduate students

• workshops, conferences

• lecture courses, summer & winter schools

• exchange of PhD students HUT, Univ. of Zürich

• ...

WP 3 partners• Acoustics Lab at Helsinki University of Technology:

– lecture courses at summer & winter schools– short visits of PhD student(s) to Acoustics Lab– consulting on speech database development– joint research projects on speech recognition– …

• EMT:– co-operation on database development– sharing information – joint projects– ...