"The Internet is, as I see it, a fantastic gift to humanity. It is, as one of my graduate students recently said, the next step in the evolution of information access. A long time ago, information was transmitted orally only; you had to be face-to-face with the speaker. With the invention of writing, the time barrier broke down — you can still read Seneca and Moses. With the invention of the printing press, the access barrier was overcome — now *anyone* with money to buy a book can read Seneca and Moses. And today, information access becomes almost instantaneous, globally; you can read Seneca and Moses from your computer, without even knowing who they are or how to find out what they wrote; simply open AltaVista and search for 'Seneca'. This is a phenomenal leap in the development of connections between people and cultures. Look how today's Internet kids are incorporating the Web in their lives.
The next step? — I imagine it will be a combination of computer and cellular phone, allowing you as an individual to be connected to the Web wherever you are. All your diary, phone lists, grocery lists, homework, current reading, bills, communications, etc., plus AltaVista and the others, all accessible (by voice and small screen) via a small thing carried in your purse or on your belt. That means that the barrier between personal information (your phone lists and diary) and non-personal information (Seneca and Moses) will be overcome, so that you can get to both types anytime. I would love to have something that tells me, when next I am at a conference and someone steps up, smiling to say hello, who this person is, where last I met him/her, and what we said then!
But that is the future. Today, the Web has made big changes in the way I shop (I spent 20 minutes looking for plane routes for my next trip with a difficult transition on the Web, instead of waiting for my secretary to ask the travel agent, which takes a day). I look for information on anything I want to know about, instead of having to make a trip to the library and look through complicated indexes. I send e-mail to you about this question, at a time that is convenient for me, rather than your having to make a phone appointment and then us talking for 15 minutes. And so on."
The Computing Research Laboratory (CRL) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) is a non-profit research enterprise committed to basic research and software development in advanced computing applications concentrated in the areas of natural language processing, artificial intelligence and graphical user interface design. Applications developed from basic research endeavors include a variety of configurations of machine translation, information extraction, knowledge acquisition, intelligent teaching, and translator workstation systems.
Maintained by the Department of Linguistics of the Translation Research Group of Brigham Young University (BYU), Utah, TTT.org (Translation, Theory and Technology) provides information about language theory and technology, particularly relating to translation. Translation technology includes translator workbench tools and machine translation. In addition to translation tools, TTT.org is interested in data exchange standards that allow various tools to interoperate, allowing the integration of tools from multiple vendors in the multilingual document production chain.
In the area of data exchange standards, TTT.org is actively involved in the development of MARTIF (machine-readable terminology interchange format). MARTIF is a format to facilitate the interchange of terminological data among terminology management systems. This format is the result of several years of intense international collaboration among terminologists and database experts from various organizations, including academic institutions, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and the Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA).
5.2. Computational Linguistics
The Laboratoire de recherche appliquée en linguistique informatique (RALI) (Laboratory of Applied Research in Computational Linguistics) is a laboratory of the University of Montreal, Quebec. The RALI's personnel includes experienced computer scientists and linguists in natural language processing both in classical symbolic methods as well as in newer probabilist methods.
Thanks to the Incognito laboratory, which was founded in 1983, the University of Montreal's Computer Science and Operational Research Department (DIRO) established itself as a leading research centre in the area of natural language processing. In June 1997, Industry Canada agreed to transfer to the DIRO all the activities of the machine-aided translation program (TAO), which had been conducted at the Centre for Information Technology Innovation (CITI) since 1984. A new laboratory — the RALI — was opened in order to promote and develop the results of the CITI's research, allowing the members of the former TAO team to pursue their work within the university community. The RALI's areas of expertise include work in: automatic text alignment, automatic text generation, automatic reaccentuation, language identification and finite state transducers.
The RALI produces the "TransX family" of what it calls "a new generation" of translation support tools (TransType, TransTalk, TransCheck and TransSearch), which are based on probabilistic translation models that automatically calculate the correspondences between the text produced by a translator and the original source language text.