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The CSIR's Nic de Vries and Professor Etienne Barnard in conversation with Professors Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch of UNISA |
The first National HLT Network (NHN) event organised by the Human Language Technology (HLT) Research Group at the CSIR Meraka Institute - which began as a flagship collaborative initiative of the Digital@SERA Focus Area - attracted some 85 participants from government, academia and industry.
The event, on 27 January 2010 at the CSIR International Convention Centre, was the culmination of the NHN collaborative effort. The NHN has been run by the HLT Research Group since 2005. Funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), the NHN aims to strengthen synergies between HLT researchers and practitioners in South Africa.
The event was opened by Imraan Patel, General Manager of Science and Technology for Impact at the DST, who highlighted the potential of HLT to grow into a vibrant industrial sector with economic impact. Another keynote speaker, Dr Mbulelo Jokweni, Head of the National Language Service at the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), spoke of the important role that HLT plays in promoting multilingualism in innovative ways. HLT is an implementation mechanism of the National Language Policy Framework of government.
The NHN event focused on bringing participants the latest developments in the multidisciplinary HLT domain. To this end, the event was organised around 30 so-called speed papers (of four minutes only - backed-up by poster discussions in the exhibition area) with five exhibition stands and 11 demonstrations held during the longer tea and lunch breaks. Presentations ranged from topics such as a recently conducted technology audit on HLT in South Africa, to speech recognition, text-to-speech, localisation of software, machine translation and natural language processing. The proceedings' abstract booklet and all the speed-paper presentations will be made available on the NHN website.
Of particular importance was a decision by the delegates to continue forming the NHN into a cooperative body. The main responsibilities of the NHN would be to create a platform for the discussion of HLT-related matters, to disseminate HLT-related information to stakeholders (including industry), and to arrange an annual event of a similar nature to that held on 27 January, to plot progress in establishing HLT as an enabling technology for government service delivery and enhancement. A further goal of the NHN must be to ensure the development of the human capital pipeline with regard to HLT.
Source: CSIR
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