Chances are that many remain uncertain about what natural language refers to. It has nothing to do with a far remote language spoken in some lost stretch of pristine nature, but simply with human language as opposed to “computer language“.

A whole part of linguistics is now closely related to computer science, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) lies at the cross-sections of linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence. NLP pertains to the application of programs and technology to all aspects of the human language, such as machine translation, spell checking, automatic summarization, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, etc.

A discipline we’re interested in here at Sorosoro as speech recognition could obviously highly contribute to the transcription and automatic translation of the dozens of hours of film data that our teams bring home from their expeditions…

Be it as it may, NLP researchers have their regular conferences, and one organized by the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing will be held at the Chiang Mai Shangri-La hotel, in Thailand, from November 8 to 13.

While the kingdom is currently suffering dramatic floods, the organizers have informed that the event will be maintained – the situation being back to normal in Chiang Mai, unlike that in Bangkok.

The program includes conferences and roundtables on poetically named-subjects such as “word tagging and segmentation”, “parsing algorithms”, “mathematical linguistics and grammatical formalisms”, or “lexical and ontological semantics”…

And one can only imagine how high the stakes are judging from the impressive list of sponsors ranging from Google to Microsoft and including Chinese operator Baidu!

More info