Human Language Technology Laboratory (HLT) pursues multidisciplinary researches and development in human spoken and written language technologies. Its primary objective is the facilitation of human-machine and human-human communication such as machine translation, information retrieval, speech processing.
Spoken-written language is an indispensable media for human communication; it is though rich of complexity, variety, and ancestral sophistication. It plays an important role as intellectual and cultural heritage differing in regions. Human language processing is therefore an important field of research whose results can be widely applied to many other areas. It narrows down language barrier while boosts up equality and distribution of information access.
Research of language processing technology in many countries had been persistently conducted, and most of them centered on major languages such as English, European languages, Japanese, and Chinese. Many applications were launched, e.g. information retrieval on the Internet, speech recognition and synthesis in mobile phones, automatic translation in dialogs, and assistive facilities for the handicapped. Participation to these new technologies is unavoidable in the borderless information world. As a result, the crucial mission of the laboratory is devoted to research and development of Thai language processing technology.
The laboratory consists of five groups:
Speech Processing Group
focusing in the areas of speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker detection, and speech corpus annotation
Text Processing Group
focusing in the areas of machine translation, electronic dictionary, and automatic summarization
Information Retrieval Group
focusing in the areas of intelligent search engine, information retrieval, and question-answering system
Language Resources and Fundamental Tools Group
focusing in the areas of Computational Linguistics, corpus construction, fundamental tools for spoken-written language processing (such as Thai word segmentation tool and Thai transliteration tool)
Service and Support Group
installing and maintaining public and proprietary services and administering internal network communication
Renowned Researches and Products
PARSIT (https://www.suparsit.com): an English-Thai machine translation system offering online free-of-charge translation services
LEXITRON (https://lexitron.nectec.or.th): an electronic English-Thai and Thai-English dictionary offering both online service and offline application
SANSARN (https://www.sansarn.com): an intelligent search engine particularized for Thai documents
VAJA (https://www.nectec.or.th/rdi/vaja): a high-fidelity Thai speech synthesizer offering both online service and offline application
