Human Language Technology. Challenges of the Information Society: Third Language and Technology Conference, LTC 2007, Poznan, Poland, October 5-7, . Papers (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

Half a centuryago not manypeople had realizedthat a new epoch in the history of homo sapiens had just started. The term “Information Society Age” seems an appropriate name for this epoch. Communication was without a doubt a lever of the conquest of the human race over the rest of the animate world. There is little doubt that the human racebegan when our predecessorsstarted to communicate with each other using language.This highly abstractmeans of communicationwas probably one of the major factors contributing to the evolutionary success of the human race within the animal world. Physically weak and imperfect, humans started to dominate the rest of the world through the creation of communication-based societies where individuals communicated initially to satisfy immediate needs, and then to create, accumulate and process knowledge for future use. The crucial step in the history of humanity was the invention of writing. It is worth noting that writing is a human invention, not a phenomenon resulting from natural evolution. Humans invented writing as a technique for recording speech as well as for storing and facilitating the dissemination of knowledge across the world. Humans continue to be born illiterate, and therefore teaching and conscious supervised learning is necessary to maintain this basic social skill.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Language and Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies, LTC 2007, held in Poznan, Poland in October 5-7, 2007.

The 40 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on speech processing, computational morphology, parsing and generation, computational semantics, digital language resources, WordNet, information retrieval/extraction and machine translation.