Challenges Facing Language Technology
The current pace of technological progress is too slow to arrive at substantial software products within the next ten to twenty years.
Although language technology has made considerable progress in the last few years, the current pace of technological progress and product innovation is too slow. We cannot wait ten or twenty years for significant improvements to be made that can further communication and productivity in our multilingual environment.
Language technologies with broad use, such as the spelling and grammar features in word processors, are typically monolingual, and they are only available for a handful of languages. Applications for multilingual communication require a certain level of sophistication. Machine translation and online services like Google Translate or Bing Translator are excellent at creating a good approximation of a document’s contents. But such online services and professional MT applications are fraught with various difficulties when highly accurate and complete translations are required. There are many well-known examples of funny sounding mistranslations, for example, literal translations of the names Bush or Kohl, that illustrate the challenges language technology must still face.
Previous:
Opportunities for Language Technology
