Aligarh : “The concept of language technology has not only established its firm relevance in the area of linguistics, information technology and machine learning, but also has gradually expanded its application in several other domains of human knowledge including many-core disciplines of sciences, humanities, and social sciences”, said Prof Niladri Sekhar Dash, an eminent linguist, author and Head, Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, while delivering a web talk on “Language Technology and its Application in Various Domains”.

An expert of Corpus Linguistics & Language Technology, Prof Dash said that at present, it is almost accepted across disciplines that language technology has put a firm foot on modern schemes of studies, research, and application of both advanced and less advanced languages on academic and commercial frontiers. He also elaborated how language technology is providing solid empirical and technological support at the grassroots level by way of introducing new strategies and methods for language data procurement, processing, analysis, and application, which help in moving further for advanced research in Computational Linguistics.

Prof Dash explained how digital language databases and technology are applied in some existing and new domains of linguistics and allied disciplines to empower these branches of human knowledge with new information, insights, and applications. He discussed through graphic representation how the introduction of language technology in academic and commercial fields has been instrumental in the creation of new job opportunities for language scholars.

Prof Dash said that we have two types of Natural Language Processing and Language Technology ? text-based and speech based. Under text-based technology, we have text categorization, text summarization, text indexing, text mining, information retrieval, question-answering system, report generation and several other text processing systems. These tools work on the texts, processed for machines in order to categorize the data and to retrieve information. Text to text machine translation is another area for text-based technology, he added.

In his concluding remarks, Prof M J Warsi (Head, Department of Linguistics) thanked Prof Niladri Dash for delivering a knowledgeable talk. He thanked all the participants who joined the web talk in a large number from far different places.