Language and culture are essential to gain access to information
in the post-industrial, global society
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It's a nice machine, but how do I get what I need?
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With the Web spanning the whole world, we can no longer use
mono-lingual, mono-cultural solutions. Current efforts are insufficient.
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With information channels everywhere, we need to deal with
content
(multimedia content accounts for 5 % of European GDP)
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Languages that are not 'digitized' will not survive
in mainstream socio-economic communication
Therefore, integrating the human sciences in computing is
not a luxury, but a necessity.
Case: Human Language Technologies
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"Speech is not just the future of Windows, but the future
of computing itself" (Bill Gates).
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"Linguists leap to the Web" (Wall Street Journal,
May 30, 2000).
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13 of 18 technical employees at Quizit Technologies have
linguistics degrees
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10 of 30 employees at Cymfony have linguistics Ph.D.s.
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Lernout and
Hauspie (Flanders) employs more than 1,100 linguists.
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Important focal point in R&D programmes (e.g. Verbmobil).
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