Imagine a future where technology and our senses are integrated. Imagine being on holiday in a different country and being able to converse with the locals via earbuds that automatically translate from the local language to yours. Imagine intelligent eyewear that translates signs into your mother tongue. Imagine being able to speak to a chatbot online in the language of your choice to access customer services from virtually anywhere in the world. Imagine all of this in real time. It’s pretty exciting to think about and it may not be as far in the future as we think.
A four-year networking project, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), started in October 2020 and currently has members from all 27 EU states in addition to 25 other countries which represents every continent. This research project, ‘Language in the Human-Machine Era’ (LITHME), will focus on new and emerging language technologies, specifically with the vision of changes in our technology landscape that will enhance human communication: speaking through technology and speaking to technology.
Speaking through technology will enable our digital tools to contribute and participate in our communication activities, such as automated translation during dialogue. The hardware we will use for this evolution will shift from our tablets and phones to our eyes and ears and can adapt other technologies such as augmented reality. We are not there yet, and this is a challenging problem, but it will happen with the help of actions such as LITHME.
Speaking to technology will enable our digital devices to not just facilitate dialogue between humans but take an active role in such dialogue. With advances in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies it may soon be possible to have digital assistants that are able to understand dialogue in a much wider variety of contexts and complexity rather than simple rote commands.
Some languages inherently possess additional challenges; languages, such as Maltese, are known as low-resource languages as they do not have as many tools, technologies and data sets available for technology support unlike heavily represented languages such as English or Chinese. The University of Malta is a participating institution in the LITHME project with participants from the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology, the Department of Artificial Intelligence and the Department of Computer Information Systems. Our local research expertise will aid in addressing the overall technological advances sought as well as aiding in the support of low-resource languages such as Maltese.
Find out more about LITHME at https://lithme.eu/
Colin Layfield is a senior lecturer with the Department of Computer Information Systems at the University of Malta.
Did you know?
• Ever wonder why airplane food tends to taste bad? Low humidity and low air pressure have an impact on the taste.
• Why does your mouth water when you describe your favourite meal? Thinking about or looking at food activates the same brain region as eating it. If only the stomach would feel full on the thought of food!
• Taste buds are found all over your mouth, not just on your tongue. That includes the roof of your mouth, the inner checks and the back of your mouth.
• Approximately 25 per cent of people are supertasters, having 100 times more taste buds than the average person.
• Flies and butterflies have taste organs on their feet, allowing them to taste anything they land on.
For more trivia see: www.um.edu.mt/think
Sound bites
• Researchers have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event that they have no power to prevent. This also sheds light on how underlying psychiatric conditions, such as OCD and anxiety, affect us differently.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/06/210611110807.htm
• Inspired by nature, researchers have created a novel material capable of capturing light energy. This material provides a highly efficient artificial light-harvesting system with potential applications in photovoltaics and bioimaging. The new material reflects the structural and functional complexity in natural hybrid materials. This material, called hybrid nanocrystals, harvest light energy like natural plants and photosynthetic bacteria but at the same time having the robustness of synthetic systems.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210515091116.htm
For more sound bites listen to Radio Mocha www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/