Human Language Technology (HLT)

The Human Language Technology (HLT) Research Area covers a large range of services and applications to support tasks where the understanding of linguistic interaction is crucial (both based on written texts and on speech), even in contexts where language is not the only communication mean. 

 

Four main areas of research and technology development can be identified: (i) large-scale information retrieval and content extraction from both text and speech; (ii) the investigation of semantic and/or cognitively plausible models for linguistic behaviors; (iii) the automatic transcription and translation of documents; (iv) the design and implementation of interactive social agents. 

 

 

• UNITN, CLIC, Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory, coordinators Massimo Poesio and Marco Baroni. Main research topics: Formal and empirical approaches to natural language semantics; linguistics, computational and cognitive aspects of concepts.
• UNITN, iKernels, Machine Learning applied to Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval, coordinator Alessandro Moschitti. Main Research Topics: statistical approaches to syntactic and semantic parsing of natural language for information search and retrieval.
• UNITN, SISL, Signals and Interactive Systems Lab, coordinator Giuseppe Riccardi. Main research topics: Speech , Language and Social Signal Understanding, Interactive Agents, Machine Learning.
• FBK-HLT, Research Unit on Human Language Technologies, coordinators Marcello Federico and Bernardo Magnini. Main research topics: machine translation, speech recognition, content extraction, development of linguistic resources. 
• FBK-SHINE, Research Unit on Speech-Acoustic Scene Analysis and Interpretation, coordinator Maurizio Omologo. Main research topics: Speech enhancement, robust speech recognition, multi-microphone distant-speech interaction and speaker diarization. 

Related research activities are carried on at LOA (CNR Laboratory of Applied Ontology) and at CELCT (Centre for the Evaluation of Language and Communication Technologies).

 

The HLT area co-organizes together with the DKE area the Trento Rise 2012 International Winter School on Language and Data/Knowledge Technologies (LaDaKT'12).