Tech Forum

I'm curious to learn about applications of natural language processing (NLP) in church service, especially within local units.

For example, a few years ago while I was serving as bishop, a new member moved to the area who spoke only Portuguese. We wanted to have a get-acquainted interview, but couldn't speak each other's language. Suddenly I remembered that I had my laptop with me, which had some early machine-translation software on it. I pulled out my laptop and launched the software. This brother didn't know what I was doing, but then I typed something like "If you type in this box in Portuguese, I will be able to see it in English". It displayed my sentence in Portuguese, and a big smile came across his face. We were able to have a reasonably effective interview there in my office, in silence, through machine translation software.

NLP applications might inlcude machine translation, human-computer natural language dialog, consistency checking of terminology, spelling & grammar checking, or even extracting facts and information from electronic text sources.

I love that story, there. It would be handy to have that sort of technology installed, just in case in case that sort of thing happens.

There are in (3rd party) development a lot of speech recognition to translation software. Yesterday I was talking to a master's student who was involved in a project where they hooked up the audio output of a TV and it was translated using the speech into spanish subtitles. It wasn't as good as a real translator, but provided the native speaker the basic concept of the program.

The basic concept would make me happy, if I was watching a foreign.