Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, 5 July 2012, 16:15

Bridging the Language Divide

As our world becomes increasingly interdependent and globalization brings people together more than ever, we quickly discover that it is no longer the "digital divide" that separates us, but the "language divide" and the associated cultural differences. Nearly everyone has a cell phone and *could* connect with everyone else on the planet, if only they shared a common language and a common understanding. Forcing uniformity however, is neither realistic nor desirable, as we enjoy the beauty and individuality of each of our languages and cultural heritage. Can technology provide an answer?

In this talk, I will discuss language technology solutions that offer us the best of both worlds: maintaining our cultural diversity while enabling the integration, communication and collaboration that our modern world has to offer. I will present cross-lingual computer Communication systems from our University labs as well as from our start-up ventures.

More specifically, we discuss:

• A pocket speech translator running on an iPhone for tourists and medical doctors. The software app, Jibbigo, launched in 2009, was the world’s first commercially available speech translator running all on a telephone (iPhone and Android).
• Speech Translation devices deployed on iPads in Humanitarian and Government Missions
• Simultaneous translation systems that translates academic lectures in real time.
• A Lecture Translation Service just deployed at KIT for the benefit of foreign students studying at a German University.

In the talk, I will review how the technology works and what levels of performance are now possible. Then we will be concerned with the delivery of such technology, so that language separation will truly fade naturally into the background. Finally, we will discuss ongoing research on the problems of portability and scaling, when we attempt to build cross-lingual communication tools for many languages and topics more effectively and inexpensively at acceptable cost.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Dietrich Klakow.