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
Apps that teach users a new language are nothing new, but a team of LTI graduate students are reinventing language learning with their new app, Swych.
Developed initially as a project for Carnegie Mellon's Machine Translation course, Swych allows a user to learn a new language by simply reading one of his or her favorite books. The app translates various words and phrases throughout the book into one of five languages — Chinese, English, French, German or Spanish. When a user encounters foreign phrases, they can click on the phrase to... Read More
Language Technologies Institute Director and Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science Jaime Carbonell has received the 2015 Okawa Prize for "outstanding contributions to research in language technologies, machine learning and computational biology in the field of artificial intelligence."
Presented by the Okawa Foundation, the Okawa Prize pays tribute... Read More
A Carnegie Mellon system designed to rapidly answer questions — even some seemingly off the wall — posed to the Yahoo! Answers website received the highest score by far in the LiveQA evaluation track at the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2015).
"This is the question answering that really matters to people," said LTI Professor Eric Nyberg, who heads the Open Advancement of Question Answering (OAQA) group. "These are... Read More
Carnegie Mellon celebrated a strong showing last month at ASSETS 2015, where a team of researchers earned the Best Demonstration Award and a student took third place in the Student Research Competition.
Jeff Bigham, an associate professor in both the LTI and Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), joined forces with HCII post-doc Luz Rello... Read More