Thursday, May 8, 2008

Professor studies what cars can learn from drivers’ words

Years ago, Stanford communication and sociology researcher Clifford Nass wondered why some people treated their computers as humans, instead of machines, a question that led him down a path of interesting research. Now he wonders about drivers willing to have personal conversations with the artificial voice in their cars—and what will become of the secrets the humans share with their four-wheeled friends. …

Full article: Physorg




 
Friday, April 18, 2008

‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built

If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US. Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

Read the full news article at New Scientist Space




 
Thursday, March 13, 2008

Nerve-tapping neckband used in ‘telepathic’ chat

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice. …

Read the full news at New Scientist Tech



Wednesday, March 12, 2008

First Humanoid Robot That Will Develop Language May Be Coming Soon

iCub, a one metre-high baby robot which will be used to study how a robot could quickly pick up language skills, will be available next year. …

Read the full news article at Science Daily



Research team develops systems that process and understand spoken language, especially Basque

A research team drawn from the Department of Systems and Automation Engineering of the Polytechnic University School and from the Faculty of Informatics at the Donostia-San Sebastián campus of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and led by lecturer Miren Karmele Lopez de Ipiña, is developing systems that process and understand spoken language and automatically obtain information particularly from Basque radio and television. …

Read the full news article at Eurekalert



Monday, November 26, 2007

First multilingual dictionary based on universal words

Researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing have developed an original system for building multilingual dictionaries based on multiple term equivalences from what are known as universal words. System reliability and accuracy is 88%. …

Read the full news release at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing



Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Scots language database takes the high road

A searchable database of over four million modern Scottish words has gone online today. The Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech was put up by Glasgow University with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The database contains a dictionary of Scottish words since 1945, proceedings from the Scottish Parliament, diaries, correspondence and audio recordings of texts. …

Read the full news story at Informatics Online



Monday, July 30, 2007

Software finds learning language child’s play

A computer program that learns to decode language sounds in a similar way to a baby could shed new light on how humans acquire the ability to talk, say US researchers. It casts doubt on the idea that babies are born with an innate understanding of all possible language sounds. …

Read the full news article at New Scientist Tech



Monday, July 2, 2007

Language software to cull and analyze text and speech in works

Researchers are hoping to help the U.S. government sort through data in various languages by developing software that can quickly cull and analyze text and speech. …

Read the full news story at Yahoo! News



Thursday, November 9, 2006

Google tops translation ranking

Google has built an English translation tool for Chinese and Arabic texts — using a team that speaks neither of the two languages. The system, which last week topped an international exercise to find the best Chinese and Arabic translation technology, is symbolic of a shift in approach to computer translation.

Read the full article at Nature



Friday, October 27, 2006

‘Tower of Babel’ translator made

A “Tower of Babel” device that gives the illusion of being bilingual is being developed by US scientists. Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another.

Read the full article at BBC News



Thursday, October 12, 2006

Gaelic language archive unveiled

More than 12,000 hours of archive recordings in Gaelic and Scots are to be made available online.

Read the full article at BBC



Thursday, September 21, 2006

How To Be Human

If this year’s winner of the Loebner Prize is on the right track, call-center data could be what’s needed to achieve the ultimate goal of artificial intelligence (AI): creating a computer program smart enough to hold a natural conversation.

Read the full article at Technology Review



Friday, August 4, 2006

Google to release corpora

A post at Google’s research blog indicates that the company is to release a sizeable set of data that might be of use for linguists. Quoted from Google:

“We believe that the entire research community can benefit from access to such massive amounts of data. It will advance the state of the art, it will focus research in the promising direction of large-scale, data-driven approaches, and it will allow all research groups, no matter how large or small their computing resources, to play together. That’s why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.”

The dataset will eventually be distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.

Read the full announcement at Google Research Blog

(Thanks go to the language log for pointing me to this news.)



Thursday, July 13, 2006

Scientists build brain box computer

The aim is to build a computer which mimics how nerve cells in the brain interact in a bid to engineer more ‘fault tolerant’ electronics. The computer will be the first of its kind and will be used to try and understand how, for example, the details of complex visual scenes are encoded by the brain.

Read the full article at EurekAlert!