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lectures > lectures spring 1999

The Nature of Human Language: why we can't talk to computers

Dr. Doug Arnold
June 12 1999

The 'Universal Translator' is a staple part of every science fiction story - a device which allows people (or more generally, beings) who lack a common language to converse freely. Could there be such a thing? More realistically, could there be such a thing for humans and human languages? For (say) English and Japanese? For English and French? If not for general conversation, what about simple things like booking a hotel room? Does any such thing exist now? To the extent that it is possible, how would it work? Answering these questions will provide an overview of the state of the art of machine translation in terms of both theory and practice. More generally it will explore some interesting issues about the nature of human language, about how we use computers to communicate, and about the challenge of 'Natural Language Processing' in general.

Dr. Doug Arnold, MA Cambridge, MA Essex, PhD Essex, studied English Literature at Cambridge and taught English in Japan before coming to Essex. His main research interests are in syntax and semantics, computational linguistics and machine translation. He is co-author of Machine Translation: an Introductory Guide (Blackwell/NCC, 1994) and joint leader of the Computational Linguistics Research Group.