Digital Libraries

In today’s post we are going to discover what digital libraries are. We can define them as libraries in which collections are stored in digital formats and accesible by computers. We can affirm that digital libraries are a type of information retrieval system.

Digital library concept

Moreover, one of the main ideas of this post is to present some of the most important digital libraries that nowadays exist such as Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, Google Book Search, etc. However, as I am studying a degree in English I thought that it would be appropriate to focus on one important digital library with contents in English. That is the reason why we are going to talk today about the Darlington Digital Library (University of Pittsburgh).

eBooks vs Traditional books

The quick development of  new technologies is transforming our lives dramatically in many aspects. One of them is literature. Nowadays, traditional books are living a little crisis due to the appearance of eBooks. An eBook (or electronic book) is, in plain words, a digital version of a traditional book.

An example of eBook: the new Sony Reader (model PRS-505)

So now you may be wondering why you should start using this new type of devices, right? The answer is quite simple: because they have a never ending list of advantages over traditional books. Let me illustrate this afirmation with a few examples:

Copyright: editors vs Internet users

Nowadays, we are living a quite strong conflict of interests between the Internet users and traditional editors due to the increasing digitalization of  books since the Net was born years ago. This topic has caused  and is still today causing a big controversy among the population and that is the reason why we wanted to mention here.

CEDRO Logo

As Delia Lipszyc perfectly describes in her book Nuevos temas de derecho de autor y derechos conexos, works can now be digitalized (transformed into binary code) and be uploaded to an Internet server. As soon as these works are available online, the general public can immediatly make an unlimited number of copies without the legal permission of the copyrights holder. Moreover, once downloaded, these copies can be manipulated, processed, amplified, reproduced and transferred via electronic mail and/or public website.

Questionnaire 3: Chatterbots

A chatterbot (chat bots, talk bots) is a type of conversational agent; it is a computer program known as Artificial Conversational Entity (ACE), which is designed to simulate a real conversation with human users.

ASIMO, created by Honda, is a humanoid robot that is able to walk and interact with humans.

And when we talk about a simulation, we really mean that because chatterbots are not capable of “understanding” the conversation. The way they “converse” is just simply by recognizing words or phrases from the human user, which allows them to use pre-calculated responses which can move the conversation on in an apparently meaningful way without requiring them to know what they are talking about.

Questionnaire 3: Question Answering (QA)

Have you ever asked yourself what happens when you introduce a question in your computer? No? Never? Then you will get surprised with today’s post because I am going to talk about Question Answering (QA).

Question Answering (QA)

Question Answering (QA) is, in information retrieval, the task of answering automatically a question asked in natural language. In order to provide you with a proper answer a QA computer program can use either a pre-structured database or a collection of natural language documents (such as the World Wide Web, for instance).

Questionnaire 2: Word Sense Disambiguation & Named Entity Recognition

We have talked in the previous post about Machine Translation (MT) because it is considered a sub-field of the Computational Linguistics that we are currently studying. Broadly speaking, MT consists of translating words or speech from one natural language to another one using translation software. As we said, MT faces two problems in two different sub-areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that we are going to discover today in this post.

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." (Genesis 11:7)

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD):

In the first place, and as you all may have guessed by now, Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) consists of identifying which sense of a word is the most suitable in a given sentence, considering, obviously, that the word has a large number of distinct senses. To achieve this goal there are two different possible approaches: deep approaches and shallow approaches.

Questionnaire 2: Machine Translation (MT)

Now, we have a clear idea of what Natural Language Processing (NLP) is; besides, we have already mentioned the most common tasks that have to do with NLP. In this post, what I would like to do is to start explaining briefly some of those topics for you to have a better understanding of them.

Trans·la·tion

Machine Translation (MT):

Machine Translation (MT) is a sub-field of Computational Linguistics whose main purpose is to develop computer software in order to translate automatically text or speech from one natural language to another one. At a first approach, MT substitutes words in one natural language for words in the target language. However, with the use of several corpus techniques we can obtain more complex translations.

Questionnaire 2: Classic HLT topics

Those of you who are hooked on Human Language Technologies (HLT) will already  know that along the year researchers publish books, give lectures and conferences… about different topics that have to do with this area of Computational Linguistics that we are currently studying.

"Oh, mother! Your databases are *so* 20th century!" "I just don't understand you unstructured kids!"

For that reason I have decided to bring here some of the most classic or important topics discussed in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Here come the examples:

Questionnaire 1: Research centres for Human Language Technologies (II)

We continue showing you examples of research centres for Human Language Technologies (HLT); today we travel to the Netherlands in order to discover The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam (Universiteit van Amsterdam).

University of Amsterdam logo

The ILLC , with researchers from the Faculty of Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities, started off in 1986 as the Institute for Logic, Language and Information; but it was not until 1991 that it was officially established as a University Research Institute. Since that year, several faculties and groups such as The Applied Logic Lab have joined the ILLC.

Questionnaire 1: Research centres for Human Language Technologies (I)

If you have been following my blog lately, you will already know what Human Language Technologies (HLT) are, as well as some of the most relevant figures that are currently investigating this field. In this post what I would like to do is to start showing you some examples of the best research centres that we have today.

Main entrance to the DFKI

The first centre that we are going to mention due to its great importance is the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). The DFKI, Germany’s leading research centre in the area of innovative software technology, has facilities in Kaiserslautern, Saarbrücken, Bremen, and a project office in Berlin. It has been recognized as a remarkable “centre of excellence” since its foundation as a nonprofit organization in 1988 by several renowned German IT companies and two research facilities. Nowadays, with an overall annual budget of more than € 25 million, the DFKI works hard in its “Living Labs” in order to launch innovative and technological solutions and products for its customers.