Festival Area: Power it Up!

Live Virtual Festival Slot: 28th Nov 5.10pm

Organisation Description

Language is our interface to the world, both the external world that we perceive and the internal world comprising our thoughts and emotions, as well as our impressions of others. Language is also an essential tool for artificial systems (including computers and robots) to interact effectively with the world around them.

At the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology (LLT), our business is the scientific study of language.

The LLT is comprised of a highly multi-disciplinary team of individuals conducting research on language from many different perspectives, including:

• Theoretical approaches to language structure, meaning and function;
• Applied linguistics;
• Sign language and linguistics;
• Computational linguistics, including machine-learning approaches to Natural Language Processing.

Voices are as unique as faces. Humans are extremely adept at picking up information about others from their voices. Click on the voice1 link here and/or the voice2 link here in order to find out what you can tell about speakers simply by listening to their voices.

You will get feedback on each response before you proceed to the following question. This should leave you in no doubt that you, like most humans, possess the amazing ability to use voice (like you do other physical features) to work out the approximate age and sex of speakers, as well as other characteristics such as where they are from, what their physical or emotional state is, etc. 

If you have any comments or questions on our What’s in a voice? feature, feel free to send an email to [email protected].  

Prof. Aquilina is considered to be the father of Maltese Linguistics, and he was instrumental in pioneering the documentation of our dialects here in Malta. Read more about his precious dialect data collected in the 1960s and 70s. Fortunately for our society, people like Prof Aquilina realised how much a dialect contributes to the richness of our society, and here in the Institute of Linguistics and Language Technology we’re working to ensure that such valuable data is treasured.The article is available in both Maltese and English in your latest edition of Think.

Semantris is a set of word association games powered by machine learning. By training on billions of conversations frrom the internet, the AI has learned how to predict which words, phrases, and even sentences might come next in a conversation.

Both games use the same AI, but provide different ways of interacting with it. When you enter a clue, the AI looks at all the words in play and chooses the ones it thinks are ,ost related.

• Arcade version – The player must type in the first word that comes to mind upon seeing the word. The input will be checked and if it is a good match, the word goes beneath the line and the player earns points. The player must be quick to match words to avoid reaching the top line with words.

• Blocks version – The player must type a word related to a word in the blocks. Once a match is found, the blocks of the same colour as the word are removed and the player earns points. More blocks are added after each match so the player must try to match as much as they can to avoid reaching the top line.

The player is presented with 2 sets of different words. In each set there is a pair of synonyms. The player must match as many synonyms as they can in 5 mins.

Players will be asked some questions and they must give the answer which they think is appropriate in a particular situation.

Try and guess the language in which these sentences are written