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Speech, Language, and Communication Across the World: Resources, Technology, and Science Modern networked computing combines graphics, text and speech in increasingly flexible ways to offer increasingly effective tools for individual users. We can control an increasingly wide range of devices, access an increasingly large fraction of the world's information, get increasingly useful advice and help on increasingly many topics, shop in increasingly diverse and convenient ways. And our networked computing devices also provide increasingly important tools for communication and cooperative interaction among people, allowing us to live and work together in the virtual worlds that were named "cyberspace" in science fiction a decade before the internet existed in real-world fact. Computer analysis and synthesis of speech and text are an increasingly important factor in this process of exchanging information with machines and other people. And what we call "language resources" have been -- and remain -- a central and essential part of the research and development that makes Human Language Technology work. Spreading these technologies across all the world's languages and dialects remains a big challenge, but it is one that government, industry, and university groups are taking on. And their task is facilitated by a virtuous cycle -- as networked digital devices manage more and more of our information and communication, these flows and stores of bits create a digital shadow universe that naturally accumulates the training data needed to make the technologies work in the first place. But this is not just a task and an opportunity for engineers. Cyberspace mediates and records the communication patterns of languages, varieties, groups, styles, and individuals; and these vast and increasing archives offer unprecedented opportunities to anyone who want to understand speech, language, and communication for scientific as well as technological, commercial, and political reasons. The list of beneficiaries is a long one: linguists, social scientists, cultural scholars, medical researchers, legal scholars, teachers and educational researchers, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, journalists, and on and on. In this talk, He gave a few examples of interesting investigations that would have been heroically difficult or even impossible just a few years ago, but now can be done in just a few minutes -- if the needed language resources are available. And He'll sketch some of the research projects that remain difficult or impossible today, but will become easy in decades to come. (责任编辑：admin) |