Language Technology 2020: The Meta-Net Priority Research Themes
Georg Rehm, Hans Uszkoreit · White paper series · 2013
For decades it has been obvious that one of the last remaining frontiers of IT is still separating our rapidly evolving technological world of mobile devices, computers and the internet from the most precious and powerful asset of mankind, the human mind, the only system capable of thought, knowledge and emotion. Although we use computers to write, telephones to chat and the web to search for knowledge, IT has no direct access to the meaning, purpose and sentiment behind our trillions of written and spoken words. This is why technology is unable to summarise a text, answer a question, respond to a letter and to translate reliably. In many cases it cannot even correctly pronounce a simple English sentence.