Machine translation
The idea that computers could be used to translate from one human language to another is nearly as old as the computer itself. Since 1950 there has been active research on the topic, and large resources and human efforts have been invested. Initially the results were rather disappointing, but during the last decade or so, machine translation has been put to use thanks to the internet and hand-held devices.
We will in this part take a glimpse on the history of machine trnaslation and techniques that have been and are currently used. We will consider in depth the ideas and techniques underlying so-called statistical machine translation (SMT) which is used e.g. by Google translate. We will also consider why machine translation is hard and problems which remain to be solved.
Spoken dialogue systems
The second half of the course will be devoted to spoken dialogue systems, which are computational agents designed to interact with humans using everyday spoken language in order to accomplish certain tasks. The goal will be to present the most important technologies, algorithms and frameworks used in this rapidly developing research area. We'll detail how spoken dialogue works, how to process and generate it, and how to transfer these ideas into real systems.