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Language technology is all about getting computers to do
useful things with human language, whether in spoken or written
form. This has become very important for two reasons. First,
with sophisticated computing power increasingly embedded in
devices all around us, we need better ways of interacting
with these machines, and speech is the obvious way to go.
Second, as any user of a search engine knows, we need to have
better ways of processing the large amounts of textual information
now available to us.
In the last 10 years, research in this area has left the
laboratory and has begun to make a significant commercial
impact. Industry activity is intense at both ends of the spectrum:
many new companies are centred on this technology, and almost
every major international IT company is pursuing developments
in Language Technology. Employers are hungry for candidates
with the necessary skills for software design and development
in this area. Be amongst the first to graduate in this exciting
and fascinating new area.
Australian science qualifications are recognised in many
countries around the world and Australian science graduates
are highly employable internationally.
Source: Group of Eight Policy Issues 2001
Graduates from ICS @ Macquarie enjoy international opportunities
in areas such as:
Spoken Language • Dialog Systems • Question Answering Systems
• Machine Translation • Text Summarisation • Information Extraction
Human Language Technology is a critical technology driving
advances in computing towards speech recognition, text processing,
search engine development and information extraction systems.
It considers how natural language text and speech may be processed
and used in ‘language sensitive’ applications such as speech
recognition systems, database interfaces, machine translation
and grammar checking.
"This course surpassed my expectations – it encourages
creativity and imagination and it gives you an appreciation
and understanding of the complexity of natural language so
easily performed by humans that depends on immense processing
power and world knowledge."
Rebecca Pettett 21, BSc(hons)BLaw BSc(Computer
Science)
"I moved to Sydney and went to Macquarie because that’s
where the research is going on in computational linguistics
(Language Technology). The Language Technology Research Group
at Macquarie draws together primary linguistics and computer
science and sometimes cognitive science. The course is structured
so it is very relevant to research, as well as having an industry
focus. It leads to jobs in a creative and imaginative area
of computer science. It covers everything from speech interfaces
– such as booking a taxi – through to the sort of research
the CSIRO is doing to build more flexible and complex language
interfaces."
Stephen Wan 25, Research Engineer CSIRO
"During the past two years the commercial application
of Language Technology has taken off in a big way. Speech
recognition requires people with special skills to develop
compelling and useful commercial applications. People are
needed who understand computer technology, human computer
interface principles and linguistic precepts.
As the leading developer of Australian speech recognition
technology and commercial speech recognition applications,
we look forward to the Macquarie Language Technology course
as an important source to meet our ever-increasing need for
talented speech professionals."
Dr John Robertson, Chief Technical Officer, CallTime
Solutions North Sydney
Private industry recruits 65% of Physics and Maths graduates
and a huge 80.7% of Computing and Electrical Engineering graduates.
Due to the pull of private industry in these fields there
is an undersupply of science and technology graduates in education.
Government bodies employ between 10 -15% of science graduates
and drive employment and educational schemes to encourage
these graduates into education at all levels.
Source: GradsOnline January 2002
Despite the economic down-turn in the Information Technology
and Telecommunications industry, there remains a skills shortage
both in Australia and the USA. Electronic and Computer Engineering
continues to grow by 112%.
Source: Gradlink January 2002
This situation is good for graduates of Language Technology
with industry partners such as CSIRO Intelligent Interactive
Technologies, Motorola Australia, Philips Speech Processing
Systems, Sun Microsystems and Appen Pty Ltd providing support
for the Language Technology Program. Some of these partners
have made available honours scholarships that allow top students
to undertake projects with industry in their final year. The
only problem you’ll have when graduating is choosing between
the many opportunities that will open up to you.
For further information on the Language
Technology Program
Contact Associate Professor Robert Dale
Ph: (02) 9850 6331
Email: ltinfo@ics.mq.edu.au.
Online: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au
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