Three Decades of Human Language Technology in Germany

Abstract

Natural language understanding is one the most challenging goals of artificial intelligence. Since almost everyone speaks and understands a language, the development of natural language systems allows the average person to interact with computer systems anytime and anywhere without special skills or training, using common devices such as a cell phone. Full natural language understanding is AI-complete, in other words it requires solutions to all other core AI problems like knowledge representation, reasoning, vision, learning, and action planning. Nevertheless, after three decades of intensive and successful research, every day millions of users experience human language technology by calling directory assistance, getting train table or account information, dictating an SMS or a patient record, or telling a navigation system their destination. Human language technology has grown from an esoteric research area, 30 years ago, to a multi-billion euro market with a total revenue of more than two billion euro just for spoken dialog systems.