Artificial intelligence might be the latest buzzword(s) in the tech world, but anyone who has used an intelligent personal agent like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa knows that challenges still exist in areas like speech recognition and machine translation.
Language Technologies Professor Alan Black agrees, and has been featured in two recent articles about AI research.
In the Forbes article "... Read More
In an article published on May 13, the Washington Post claimed that Donald Trump routinely posed as his own public relations agent in the 1980s and 1990s, using the alias "John Miller" or "John Barron" to boast of Trump's personal and professional successes. When questioned about it now, though, Trump resolutely denies doing any such thing. What's a person to believe?
Enter... Read More
The old saying holds that "many hands make light work," and modern crowdsourcing efforts certainly prove that to be true. One standout example is Wikipedia, which relies on a network of people around the world to create, edit and maintain its entries. Editors on the site assume different roles according to their areas of expertise: some may add large chunks of information to an entry, while others may stick to smaller tasks like copyediting.
In the past, systems designed to route work to appropriate Wikipedia editors have focused on matching editors to articles that relate to ones... Read More
WeSpeke, a global digital learning platform designed for practicing languages, sharing cultures and making international connections co-founded by LTI Director Jaime Carbonell, has announced the addition of a new app to its language-learning arsenal.
The new technology, WeSpeke Lessons, allows users to access and purchase high-quality language lessons delivered in an easy-to-use interface.... Read More
Two teams of Language Technologies Institute students have won top honors in the annual 11-761/11-661: Language and Statistics course project.
Students in the course, which aims to ground the data-driven techniques used in language technologies in sound statistical methodology, must complete a substantial team project at the end of the semester. The project requires students to investigate, discover and exploit deficiencies in the conventional... Read More
Voice-activated technologies like Siri and Cortana help facilitate communication between humans and artificial intelligence. It's a simple pattern: the human speaks, the machine processes that speech and the machine answers.
Language Technologies Institute Professor Alan Black recently spoke to CIO.com about how this current model of artificial intelligence interaction results in stilted communication. He believes... Read More
The LTI's "Let's Go!" project entered its 12th year of serving Allegheny County's bus riders this month. Initially developed as a night service for the Port Authority of Allegheny County, the automated information line now provides riders with around-the-clock details about when the next bus will arrive, if it's full and even if it's been rerouted for... Read More
A readability analysis of presidential candidate speeches by researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) finds most candidates using words and grammar typical of students in grades six through eight, though Donald Trump tends to lag behind the others.
A historical review of their word and grammar use suggests all five candidates in the analysis — Republicans Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (who has since suspended his campaign); and Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — have been... Read More
Alan Black, a Scottish computer scientist and professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, was recently featured in two articles discussing developments in voice-activated technology.
The New York Times article "Creating a Computer Voice That People Like" discusses the roots of modern speech synthesis technology, which Black’s work investigates. Black said that even... Read More
A nutrition-based diarrhea treatment developed by Language Technologies Institute Systems Scientist Ravi Starzl and his father, Tim, has been selected as a leading innovation in the maternal, child and newborn healthcare category of Innovation Countdown 2030's (IC2030) Reimagining Global Health report. The initiative identifies and showcases lifesaving innovations with great promise to transform global health by 2030, and... Read More