Language Technology Support for Latvian

Abstract

Language technologies are software systems designed to handle human language and are therefore often called “human language technology”. Human language comes in spoken and written forms. While speech is the oldest, and in terms of human evolution the most natural form of language communication, complex information and most human knowledge is stored and transmitted in written texts. Speech and text technologies process or produce these different forms of language, though they both use dictionaries and rules of grammar and semantics. This means that language technology (LT) links language to various forms of knowledge, independently of the media (speech or text) it is expressed in illustrates the LT landscape. When we communicate, we combine language with other modes of communication and information media—for example, speaking can involve gestures and facial expressions. Digital texts link to pictures and sounds. Movies may contain language in spoken and written form. In other words, speech and text technologies overlap and interact with other technologies that facilitate the processing of multimodal communication and multimedia documents. In the following, we will discuss the main application areas of language technology, i. e., language checking, web search, speech technology, and machine translation. This includes applications and basic technologies such as: