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I-TERMS: Terms for computer junkies
PUMP up your computer-related vocabulary! Load your brains with these frequenty used i-terms.
Computational linguistics: This is another name for Natural Language Processing (NLP). It is a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with analyzing, understanding and generating the languages that humans use naturally in order to interface with computers in both written and spoken contexts using natural human languages instead of computer languages.
One of the challenges inherent in natural language processing is teaching computers to understand the way humans learn and use language. Take, for example, the sentence “Baby swallows fly.” This simple sentence has multiple meanings, depending on whether the word “swallows” or the word “fly” is used as the verb, which also determines whether “baby” is used as a noun or an adjective. In the course of human communication, the meaning of the sentence depends on both the context in which it was communicated and each person’s understanding of the ambiguity in human languages. This sentence poses problems for software that must first be programmed to understand context and linguistic structures.
TTS: Short for text-to-speech, a form of speech synthesis that converts text into spoken voice output. TTS systems were first developed to aid the visually impaired by offering a computer-generated spoken voice that would “read” text to the user.
TTS should not be confused with voice response systems. Voice response systems synthesize speech by concatenating sentences from a database of prerecorded words and are used for different purposes than TTS systems, which form sentences and/or phrases based on a language’s graphemes and phonemes. Voice response systems are limited to synthesizing sentences that contain only words that have been predetermined by the system. TTS systems, in contrast, are theoretically capable of “reading” any string of text characters to form original sentences.
Speech synthesis: Refers to a computer’s ability to produce sound that resembles human speech. Although they can’t imitate the full spectrum of human cadences and intonations, speech synthesis systems can read text files and output them in a very intelligible, if somewhat dull, voice. Many systems even allow the user to choose the type of voice — for example, male or female. Speech synthesis systems are particularly valuable for seeing-impaired individuals.
Voice response system: A form of speech synthesis in which sentences are formed by concatenating pre-recorded words from a database. Unlike a TTS system, which uses speech synthesis to form spontaneous sentences and/or phrases based on human phonetics, a voice response system operates with a limited vocabulary in situations where the sentences and/or phrases that are formed follow a strict predetermined pattern. For example, a train station may use a voice response system to notify passengers of schedule information or a train’s status.
The synthesized speech is created from a pool of words that are strung together based on the input of a human operator, and the pool only contains a limited number of words as there are a limited number of combinations of words that are necessary for the train station’s purpose; financial institutions also use voice response systems to aid customers in getting account information over the telephone.
The same principle applies here — since the financial institution only needs to provide the caller with a limited amount of information, it does not need to be able to generate spontaneous sentences in response to customer inquiries.
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