The Department
The Human Language Technology (HLT) department is a key
competency centre within Institute
for Infocomm Research (I2R), throughout
Singapore and the region. Guided by a passion for natural,
human languages and a keen sense of innovation, the HLT
department’s mission is to ideate and produce state-of-the-art
language technologies that drive the development of ground-breaking
yet practical applications and services. With our valuable
team members, the department will chart new research directions
and spearhead technological advancements that facilitate
and even transform human communication through new language
technologies.
The HLT department is led by a group of established scientists
and engineers, some of whom are synonymous with their
respective areas of specialization. Our fields of expertise
include automatic speech recognition, speaker and language
recognition, statistical natural language processing,
machine translation, and information retrieval technologies.
The many years of innovative HLT activities and the varied
backgrounds of the HLT research team contribute to the
department’s strength and its areas of focus: Asian
languages and multilingual computing.
Our flagship technologies include patented machine translation
for South-East Asian languages, and the Abacus multilingual
speech recognition platform – all of which have
been deployed in various commercial applications.
Exciting R&D activities and endeavours are still
budding. The HLT department has embarked on a project
on Social Robotics since robots are very useful tools
for studying social abilities in humans and for servicing
humans' needs. This team leverages on existing human language
technologies to further advance the enabling technologies
for a social robotic platform. This initiative could provide
insights of interface design in human robot interaction,
as well as explore how humans communicate and solve problems
through the use of speech and language technologies.
Do explore this HLT department website to get a better
picture of the exciting language technologies and projects
that we are working on, and we look forward to your participation
in upcoming HLT-related activities and events.
Deparment head:
Dr Haizhou
Li.
Key Competencies & Potential Applications
-
Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR)
- Applications: Automatic Transcription; Spoken Document
Retrieval; Voice Surveillance
-
Speaker and Language Recognition (SLR) - Applications:
Personal Gaming & Entertainment Systems, Voice
Biometrics; Spoken Document Retrieval; Automatic Call
Routing
-
Rich Transcription Multilingual Modeling - Applications:
Machine Translation; Multilingual Information Management
-
Social Robotics - Applications: Sovice robot for
home, office, and tourism.
