For immediate release 14 August 1997
Human Language Processors Meet
in Hong Kong as Interest Grows in
Chinese Language
A language processing conference jointly hosted by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Tsinghua University, Beijing, on 18 and 20 August, reflects growing interest in the Chinese language during a worldwide renaissance in human language
technology.
The Fifth Workshop on Very Large Corpora brings together
international experts in computational linguistics for their first Asian meeting, held as research interest in languages other than
English--and especially Chinese--increases.
"The very different structure and script of the Chinese language provide extra challenges to computational linguists," said Dr Dekai Wu of HKUST's Department of Computer Science and Human Language Technology Center, the local organizer of the Workshop. "As the world increasingly communicates online, this research will help information to cross language borders."
Before a computer can be programmed to recognize, translate or correct language, it needs to understand how each language works. One way is to computer-analyze large collections of recorded speech or text, known as corpora.
Recent breakthroughs use techniques from statistics, pattern
recognition and machine learning to help break the so-called "artifical intelligence bottleneck", by extracting knowledge from corpora automatically.
Practical applications are limitless--improved or bilingual Web search engines, automatic speech recognition, computer translation programs or new language learning programs created by analyzing learners' errors are some of the possibilities.
The Workshop is sponsored by Lexis-Nexis (a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc.), the Association for Computational Linguistics, AT&T Labs-Research, the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems, China, and City University of Hong Kong.
Event: Fifth Workshop on Very Large Corpora--Hong Kong session Date: Wednesday, 20 August 1997
Time: 8:30 am - 6:25 pm
Venue: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear
Water Bay, Kowloon
Homepage: http://www.cs.ust.hk/faculty/dekai/wvlc-5
Note: The Beijing session will take place on 18 August at Tsinghua
University.
Note to Editors:
For further information, please contact the Office of Public Affairs on 2358-6306, 2358-6308, or email pamedia@usthk.ust.hk.
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