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CSIR's Nic de Vries and Professor Etienne Barnard in conversion with Professors Laurette Pretorius and Sonja Bosch of UNISA
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The first National HLT Network (NHN) event, which was organised by the Human Language Technology (HLT) Research Group of the CSIR Meraka Institute on 27 January 2010 at the CSIR International Convention Centre, attracted some 85 participants from government, academia and industry.
Dubbed a 'super info session' by Professor Danie Prinsloo, Head of Department of African Languages at the University of Pretoria for the range and quantity of presentations, the event was the culmination of the NHN collaborative effort. The NHN has been run by the HLT Research Group of the CSIR Meraka Institute since 2005, with funding from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and 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. He said, "We need to increase our ICT balance of payments to support the modernisation of our local economy and enhance service delivery." Human capital development remains an important priority - "I hope that in 10 years from now, the number of HLT practitioners and researchers will have trebled at an event such as this!" he said.
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 DAC gave strong support to the CSIR Meraka Institute for research and development and implementation of the Lwazi project, a multilingual telephone-based information system, which allows citizens to access services and information in their official languages of choice. He said, "The DAC has already identified more projects" for funding in the future. Another milestone in the HLT domain is the establishment of a National Centre for HLT, which is guided by a national HLT expert panel of which Professor Etienne Barnard from the HLT group at the CSIR Meraka Institute is the chairperson. Dr Jokweni concluded his presentation by giving credit on behalf of the DAC to the HLT community.
The NHN day 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
There was immensely positive feedback by attendees, in terms of the opportunity to network and showcase their technology, especially from an industry perspective, as well as in terms of the breadth of HLT areas covered in the speed papers, demonstrations and exhibitions.
Professor Sonja Bosch, Chair of Department of African Languages, at UNISA noted that the format of the event allowed good participation and excellent networking opportunities. Charl Barnard, CEO of Molo Afrika Speech Technologies Pty (Ltd), whose company specialises in call-centre services and automation, confirmed the value of the day in helping industry stay up-to-date with cutting-edge HLT technology.
Dwayne Bailey, a director of translate.org.za, highlighted the importance of localisation of technology through HLT, "By making a spell checker available in isiZulu, we immediately confer on it (isiZulu) the status of a first-class language." He would like to see localisation of technology as the norm.
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.
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