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NLP technology applications?

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 11:49 am
by jamesdaff-p40
I'm curious to learn about applications of natural language processing (NLP) in church service, especially within local units.

For example, a few years ago while I was serving as bishop, a new member moved to the area who spoke only Portuguese. We wanted to have a get-acquainted interview, but couldn't speak each other's language. Suddenly I remembered that I had my laptop with me, which had some early machine-translation software on it. I pulled out my laptop and launched the software. This brother didn't know what I was doing, but then I typed something like "If you type in this box in Portuguese, I will be able to see it in English". It displayed my sentence in Portuguese, and a big smile came across his face. We were able to have a reasonably effective interview there in my office, in silence, through machine translation software.

NLP applications might inlcude machine translation, human-computer natural language dialog, consistency checking of terminology, spelling & grammar checking, or even extracting facts and information from electronic text sources.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 2:40 pm
by sochsner
I love that story, there. It would be handy to have that sort of technology installed, just in case in case that sort of thing happens.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 3:26 pm
by thedqs
There are in (3rd party) development a lot of speech recognition to translation software. Yesterday I was talking to a master's student who was involved in a project where they hooked up the audio output of a TV and it was translated using the speech into spanish subtitles. It wasn't as good as a real translator, but provided the native speaker the basic concept of the program.

Posted: Wed Jan 31, 2007 5:24 pm
by sochsner
The basic concept would make me happy, if I was watching a foreign.