Research
Language Technologies
In this section, you will find a list of our language technologies research projects (emerging, current, and completed). You can also choose to browse by researcher to learn more about his or her specific field of study and associated collaborators.
For information on calls for papers, consult the calendar.
Expertise
The Language Technology Research Centre (LTRC) brings many language technology experts together under one roof. Researchers, professors and students in the language, computer science and engineering fields are joining up with language professionals and specialized language technology companies in a wide range of complementary skills and knowledge supporting highly specialized projects. The close collaboration between language and technology professionals is the key to improving existing products and creating new technological solutions to language problems. One of the main goals of this collaboration is to support the Canadian language industry. Canada has built a solid reputation in translation and terminology thanks to its long-standing tradition of institutional bilingualism. This reputation has crossed borders and brought Canada into a sought-after international spotlight. That being said, given market growth and the increase in the sheer volume of information, the industry is running out of steam; the number of new graduates is no longer enough to satisfy the demand.
Creating Tools for International Distribution
Though high-quality tools already exist, they do have their limitations and shortcomings. The research conducted at the LTRC corresponds to that done in businesses and in university research centres.
LTRC’s main areas of interest are the following:
-
Multilingual content management and semantic search tools
Since the advent of the Internet, the amount of available information has been growing at an extraordinary rate, and the proportion of textual content in different languages is ever increasing. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly important to find a solution to linguistic and cultural roadblocks that hinder communication and limit access to many resources. It is essential to create a new generation of tools to filter and catalogue content, regardless of the language used, for translation and accessibility purposes.
Speech processing has great potential for improving the interaction between humans and machines. It includes software components, tools, techniques and applications that imitate the ability to hear, recognize and produce natural language spoken by humans. Speech processing can also be added to by natural language processing (NLP), which imitates a human’s ability to understand and process the content of human language. This can translate spoken sentences from one language to another and carry out a number of intelligent linguistic functions. The convergence of information technology, telephony and electronics, as well as the need for a new user interface stimulate the demand for speech processing systems. Ongoing investment in research and development combined with existing infrastructures that lower market penetration costs will drive this industry towards soaring heights.
-
Language tools and resources for language professionals
Translation and writing tools: In order to respond to the growing demands of the market, the productivity of language professionals must increase. Increasingly, translation memories, Web localization tools, machine translation (MT) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, terminology extractors, word processing software and spell-checkers are being integrated into language professionals’ work. Research continues to improve these tools’ efficiency and their integration into the daily lives of language professionals.
Terminology and quality standards and standardization of linguistic database: Increasing productivity is indeed an important factor. However, for a project to be successful, its delivered product must also be of high quality. For this reason, quality evaluation and the creation of standards for linguistic products are important issues.
With the goal of creating multilingual and multicultural solutions that are easily adaptable to target uses and audiences, attention must be placed foremost on uniformity, interoperability and simplicity. This objective is conditional upon strict standardization of the components of a solution, namely procedures, production techniques, content organization and data presentation.
Technology has become essential for language professionals in today’s world. People are becoming increasingly aware of the advantages and the importance of technological tools to boost translation productivity.
