Language engineering - a champion for European culture

Language is key to culture. It is a direct cultural medium as well as a means of recording and providing access to non-lingual elements of culture. Language is also fundamental to a sense of cultural identity. For this reason, it is vital, in a changing Europe, that we preserve the multi-lingual character of our society in order to move successfully towards closer co-operation at a political, economic, and social level. Language engineering is the application of knowledge of language to the development of computer software which can recognise, understand, interpret, and generate human language in all its forms. The paper provides a high level view of the ‘state of the art’ in language engineering and indicates ways in which it will have a profound impact on our culture in the future. It shows how advances in language engineering are an important aid in maintaining cultural diversity in a multi-lingual European society, while enabling the development of social cohesion across cultural and national divides. It addresses issues raised by the prospect of the Multi-lingual Information Society, including education, human communication with technology and information management, as well as aspects of digital cities such as tele-presence in digital libraries, virtual art galleries and electronic museums. The paper raises the issue of language as a factor in cultural domination, showing the contribution that language engineering can make towards countering it. The paper also raises a number of controversial issues concerning the likely benefits arising from the ways in which language is likely to influence the culture of Europe

Measuring concept similarities in multimedia ontologies: analysis and evaluations

The recent development of large-scale multimedia concept ontologies has provided a new momentum for research in the semantic analysis of multimedia repositories. Different methods for generic concept detection have been extensively studied, but the question of how to exploit the structure of a multimedia ontology and existing inter-concept relations has not received similar attention. In this paper, we present a clustering-based method for modeling semantic concepts on low-level feature spaces and study the evaluation of the quality of such models with entropy-based methods. We cover a variety of methods for assessing the similarity of different concepts in a multimedia ontology. We study three ontologies and apply the proposed techniques in experiments involving the visual and semantic similarities, manual annotation of video, and concept detection. The results show that modeling inter-concept relations can provide a promising resource for many different application areas in semantic multimedia processing

The Janus Head Article - On Quality in the Documentation Process

The god Janus in Greek mythology was a two-faced god; each face had its own view of the world. Our idea behind the Janus Head article is to give you two different and maybe even contradicting views on a certain topic. In this issue the topic is quality in the documentation process. In the first half of this issue’s Janus Head Article translators from the international company Grundfos give us their view of quality and how quality is managed in the documentation process at Grundfos. In the second half of the Janus Head Article scholars from the University of Southern Denmark describe and discuss quality in the documentation process at Grundfos from a researcher’s point of view

E-Learning for Teachers and Trainers : Innovative Practices, Skills and Competences

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Language technologies for a multilingual Europe

This volume of the series “Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing” includes most of the papers presented at the Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe”, held at the University of Hamburg on September 27, 2011 in the framework of the conference GSCL 2011 with the topic “Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications”, along with several additional contributions. In addition to an overview article on Machine Translation and two contributions on the European initiatives META-NET and Multilingual Web, the volume includes six full research articles. Our intention with this workshop was to bring together various groups concerned with the umbrella topics of multilingualism and language technology, especially multilingual technologies. This encompassed, on the one hand, representatives from research and development in the field of language technologies, and, on the other hand, users from diverse areas such as, among others, industry, administration and funding agencies. The Workshop “Language Technology for a Multilingual Europe” was co-organised by the two GSCL working groups “Text Technology” and “Machine Translation” (http://gscl.info) as well as by META-NET (http://www.meta-net.eu)

Features of an Error Correction Memory to Enhance Technical Texts Authoring in LELIE

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the notion of error correction memory applied to technical texts. The main purpose is to introduce flexibility and context sensitivity in the detection and the correction of errors related to Constrained Natural Language (CNL) principles. This is realized by enhancing error detection paired with relatively generic correction patterns and contextual correction recommendations. Patterns are induced from previous corrections made by technical writers for a given type of text. The impact of such an error correction memory is also investigated from the point of view of the technical writer"s cognitive activity. The notion of error correction memory is developed within the framework of the LELIE project an experiment is carried out on the case of fuzzy lexical items and negation, which are both major problems in technical writing. Language processing and knowledge representation aspects are developed together with evaluation directions

Automating generation of textual class definitions from OWL to English

Text definitions for entities within bio-ontologies are a cornerstone of the effort to gain a consensus in understanding and usage of those ontologies. Writing these definitions is, however, a considerable effort and there is often a lag between specification of the main part of an ontology (logical descriptions and definitions of entities) and the development of the text-based definitions. The goal of natural language generation (NLG) from ontologies is to take the logical description of entities and generate fluent natural language. The application described here uses NLG to automatically provide text-based definitions from an ontology that has logical descriptions of its entities, so avoiding the bottleneck of authoring these definitions by hand