Introduction to Language Technologies:

Challenges and Applications

Sameh Alansary

s.alansary@alexu.edu.eg

Prof. of Computational Linguistics

Head of Phonetics and Linguistics Dept.
Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University

Lecture 1
 Outline
• Introduction.
• What is Language Technology?
• Motivation of Language Technology.
• Requirements /Challenges.
• Language Resources needed.
• Applications.
• Conclusion
Introduction

Globalization
 Web content by language
Arabic English
1.80% 1.50% 1.40% 1.20% Russian
4.20% 2.30% German
4.40%
4.50% Spanish
French
4.70%
Chinese
Japanese
5.90%
Portuguese
Polish
5.90%
54.70% Italian
English Turkish
Arabic
Communication over the Internet

English
Arabic User

English User
English
Language
English
English

French User Spanish User

 Two issues are noted:

• One language dominates the internet.

• There is a huge and interesting web content.

• Look at this running statistics:
 Disadvantages of one-language
dominance :
• Preventing the spread of knowledge.
• Loosing identity and nationality.
• Spreading cultural hegemony.
• Extinction of languages.
 Desired situation

English
Arabic User

English User
English
Language
Spanish
French

French User Spanish User

Towards a Language Independent Web !

How can this be achieved?

Examples:
‫أكل الولد التفاحة‬
‫التفاحة أكلها الولد‬
The boy ate the apple
The apple was eaten by the boy
男の子 はりんご を食べる
le garçon mange la pomme
 Actor Theme

Universal Y X Z
Event

Actor Theme
‫التفاحة‬
‫الولد‬
Arabic
‫أكل‬ ‫الولد‬ ‫أكل‬ ‫التفاحة‬
Dictionary Event

Arabic‫د‬Grammar
‫التفاحة‬ ‫أكل الول‬
O S V
 Interesting Huge Web Content !

• Live and authentic data.

• Corpora : Translational, comparable , educational, etc.
• Big data analytics ..
• Applications: knowledge extraction, data /text mining,
summarization, plagiarism .. etc.
Therefore, there is urgent need for computers to
process / understand Natural Language

Language Technologies -
Computational Linguistics
i.e. to compute linguistic rules !!
 Can You Read This ?

How could you read it? Any explicit explanation ?

The Process of Understanding
“The boy is eating an apple in the garden”
Eating 201168468
action

Place
110285313
107739125

110285313

This is what the HLT is trying

to simulate ..
•How to represent meaning?
•Are there tools and resources capable of processing meaning representation?