Language Technology

Language is both a key to knowledge and a key to communication. The automatic capture of texts and language as well as the processing and extraction of relevant information serve as the basis for many intelligent applications and services. The natural language interaction between man and machine has now arrived in everyday life. As there are about 60 languages in Europe alone, multilingualism plays an increasingly important role in many applications. All this makes language a core topic of the AI.

Two research areas are researching language at DFKI – the Speech and Language Technology (SLT) Lab in Berlin under the direction of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Möller and the Department of Multilinguality and Language Technology (MLT) in Saarbrücken under the direction of Prof. Dr. Josef van Genabith.

Our goal is it to advance the use and the understanding of the human language by machines, to develop appropriate IT-solutions and to compile concrete solutions for enterprises. Language Technology is the application-oriented sister of Computational Linguistics and is occasionally referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

• We carry out research in the field of language technology together with other leading institutes and companies within the frameworks of funded projects and contracts.
• We develop and test state-of-the-art methods and software for processing text, language and knowledge.
• We develop new and improved solutions for information and knowledge management, text translation and natural communication.
• We base our developments on the actual needs of the end user and the requirements of the market.
• We evaluate the usability and user-friendliness of language technology systems and design new evaluation methods.
• We advise companies in various areas of artificial intelligence.

Central fields of activity are machine learning, text analytics, machine translation, natural language dialogue systems, human-robot interaction and the creation and curation of digital content.