230562 English in Application Contexts: Language and Technology (S) (SoSe 2007)

The goal of this seminar is to enable participants to understand the infrastructures with make our modern Information Society possible, and to sue these infrastructures efficiently. In the Information Society, with its emphasis on technology-mediated communication and information storage, and hence on the Information and Communication Technologies, is heavily dependent on language as a vehicle for information interchange and as a matrix for embedding multimedia information. The development of ICT software is, in turn, heavily dependent on linguistics as a science which provides systematic models for ICT systems:

• Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
• Dictation software, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) & Text-To-Speech Synthesis (TTS)
• Internet functionalities such as information retrieval from databases, for example for search (e.g. concordancing with Google and other search engines), and for e-shopping (e.g. e-bay)
• document generation from databases, as in information retrieval activities, blogs and share sites (myspace etc.), hypertext dictionaries and encyclopaedias, news streams.

In this class, both theoretical and applied aspects of linguistics in selected application contexts will be investigated, including elementarytext search and elementary speech synthesis.

The class counts either for PM1 or for PM2 but not both. Participants are required to create weekly updates to their class portfolios on the internet. Further information will be made available at this address before the class starts:

External comments page

http://wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/~gibbon/Classes/Classes2007SS/index.html