Language engineering - Harnessing the power of language
The European Commission, DG XIII, has published a brochure, "Harnessing the power of language", outlining the research fields covered by the "Language Engineering" sector of the Telematics Applications programme. The brochure underlines the importance of language in everyday communications, but notes that in the absence of a common language, understanding between two individuals is often extremely limited. Language engineering aims to extend humans' use of language to their communications with applications, systems and services. By enhancing the value of language in every aspect of communications, language engineering applications will allow many people who would previously have been unable to communicate in depth to understand each other, in addition to improving their ability to communicate with computer systems. Language engineering is the development of computer systems which can recognise, understand, interpret and generate human language in all its forms. In practice it comprises a set of techniques, implemented by computer software, and language resources, stored electronically and accessible by the software. The techniques developed by language engineering include speech recognition, character and document image recognition, natural language understanding and generation and speech generation. The language resources used by language engineering techniques include lexicons, grammars, and specialist corpora and terminologies.