Challenges and advances in natural language processing

On 20 September, the Debate Workshop on applications of Language Technologies will be held addressing the actions carried out within the Language Technologies Promotion Plan (LT Plan) with tools such as the public procurement of innovation services or participation in European programmes. The development of ICT information and communication technologies is generating an enormous volume of electronic textual information that is increasing in an unstoppable way. To take advantage of such electronic information, it must be done automatically. Language Technologies - and within them natural language processing (NLP) - allow the precise automatic understanding of human language, which entails great challenges. Computer systems process numerical data simply, but human language is much more complex because it is accompanied by nuances and meanings that depend on context and non-explicit information. This discipline can be applied to different areas and fields: from automatic machine translation to the retrieval and extraction of relevant information, and from digging for opinions to automatic generation of text summaries, making natural language processing technologies an emerging, innovative industry that has great opportunities for growth.

On Wednesday, 20 September, the activity will also aim to promote the transfer of knowledge and the sharing of opinions among the different professionals in the LT field of public administrations, research centres, universities and companies, as well as to increase knowledge about the language technology situation in other Spanish-speaking countries and to deepen the needs of users and the potential of language technologies in two sectors of particular relevance to the Spanish economy and society: health and tourism. Specifically, promoting the internationalisation of Spanish companies is one of the measures contemplated in the Plan.

In particular, four workshops will be held in the following areas with the participation of numerous experts:

• Coordination of Language Technologies Initiatives between Mexico and Spain
• Harnessing Synergies between Large and Small Companies
• Applications of LT in Tourism
• Health Improvements with the Use of LTs

Transforming electronic textual information into reusable formats and publishing it under open licenses can turn natural language processing (NLP) technologies into a driving force for the language technology industry. In the last 10 years, Google Translate has gone from supporting only a few languages ​​to now supporting 103, translating more than 140 billion words every day, while technology continues advancing at an unstoppable pace from the hand of artificial intelligence towards the development of their own language.

The Debate was organised by SESIAD within the framework of the XXXIII International Conference of Spanish Natural Language Processing Society (SEPLN in Spanish) and will take place in the Auditorium of the Universidad de Murcia. The event will be recorded and will subsequently be made available online at red.es.