Abstract
People communicate using the languages they have known since early childhood, yet computers remained ignorant of their users’ languages for a long time. It took many years until they could reliably handle scripts of languages other than English. It took even longer until computers could check the spelling of texts and read them aloud for the visually impaired. On the web we can now get rough translations and search for texts containing a word, even if the word occurs in a different form from the one we search. But when it comes to interpreting certain input and responding correctly, computers only “understand” simple artificial languages such as Java, C++ and HTML. In the next IT revolution computers will master our languages. Just as they already understand measurements and formats for dates and times, the operating systems of tomorrow will know human languages. They may not reach the linguistic performance of educated people and they will not yet know enough about the world to understand everything, but they will be much more useful than they are today and will further enhance our work and life.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2013 META-TRUST AISBL (http://www.meta-trust.eu )
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rehm, G., Uszkoreit, H. (2013). Language Technology 2020: The Meta-Net Technology Vision. In: Rehm, G., Uszkoreit, H. (eds) META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. White Paper Series. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36349-8_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36349-8_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-36348-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-36349-8
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)