Masteropleidingen

Dr. Menno van Zaanen

"One of the interesting aspects of Human Aspects of Information Technology is that the field is in continuous flux. You find yourself constantly weighing: how relevant are certain developments, what direction are they moving in? Our students are looking ahead, they want to perfect existing technologies and meet new challenges.

Blogs, wikis, and canned voice-response systems no longer attract your special interest. You can place them, but you want to push ahead: personalisation technology, artificial speech, advanced search engines, social tagging. It is fascinating to be part of the development of technologies that until recently were known mainly from science fiction."

Great diversity of applications
"Some of the applications can already be seen in practice, others are still in an experimental phase. An application that is already out there is the fairly natural speech systems, as that employed in the Dutch Rail journey planner, which uses speech recognition and speech synthesis. Then there are the search engines, of course, the best known of which is Google. A good example of the application of personalisation technology is the amazon.com website. It remembers your purchases, and on the basis of these compiles a personal page, which you land on immediately next time you go to the site.

Another area of application is that of opening up archives. This is happening on an ever- bigger scale. One of the projects that our department is directly involved in is the digitisation by the Dutch Royal Library of 8 million newspaper pages, starting in the 17th century. As language technologists we play an important role in developing a smart search engine to open up all this information."

Taking new steps
"Looking to the future, we won't have to wait long before we will all have a personal information assistant on our computers. This digital 'helper' will constantly show you where to find additional information on the subject you are writing about there and then. If you want to make use of that information, you can link on to a website, a previously sent email, or a document on your computer, for instance."

The Power of Language Technology
"Another future development: digitisation of our artistic heritage. In most cases, short digital descriptions of works of art are derived from the original captions as we find them in museums for instance. But the people this heritage is opened up for will often use quite different keywords when they want to look something up. To keep yourself from overshooting the mark, you can ask users to add their own keywords while they are reading. This is called social tagging. The search engine saves new words, which automatically makes it better and more accessible. It is examples like these that clearly illustrate the power of natural language technology."