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Posthumous festschrift in honour of late professor R.O. Ezeuko, edited by Dr. Odinye, Egenti & Orji 

 

38 

 

THE RELATION BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION 

TECHNOLOGY (IT) 

 

Egenti, Martha Chidimma 

Department of Linguistics 

Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka 

egentinma@gmail.com 

 

& 

 

Dereck-M Akachukwu Orji 

Department of Linguistics 

Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka 

 

 

Abstract 

 

In the growth of technological advancements, there is need to highlight some of 

the technological tools that enhance academic research in linguistics at different 

levels of grammar given the availability of software that improves linguistic 

analysis.  This study is simply geared towards bringing to limelight some of these 

linguistics tools and their uses as a way of creating awareness. Also, the relation 

between language and information technology (IT) shows that language is a sole 

carrier of volumes of information while IT is a veritable tool through which data 

are analyzed and interpreted. 

 

Keywords: language, information, technology 

 

1. Introduction 

Today, technological advancements have permeated every nook and cranny of the 

world and have turned it into a global village. People from all walks of life; 

including professionals, students, and the general population are confronted by 

unprecedented volumes of information, the vast bulk of which is stored as 

unstructured text.  

 

Bird, Klein and Loper (2008:14), notes that in 2003, it was estimated that the 

annual production of books amounted to 8Terabytes. (A Terabyte is 1,000 

Gigabytes, i.e., equivalent to 1,000 pickup trucks filled with books.) It would take 



 

 

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a human being about five years to read the new scientific material that is produced 

every 24 hours. Although these estimates are based on printed materials, 

increasingly the information is also available electronically. Indeed, there has 

been an explosion of text and multimedia content on the World Wide Web. For 

many people, a large and growing fraction of work and leisure time is spent 

navigating and accessing this universe of information. Language on the other 

hand, is the sole carrier of this bulk of information which is embodied in the 

several language technologies whether it is spoken or written data. We shall in the 

subsequent sections look at the language and its richness, give an overview of 

information technology and language technology and specific areas of linguistics 

in which computers are used for linguistic analysis. 

 

 

2. Language and its Richness 

 

According to Bird, Klein and Loper (2008:14), Language is rich. It is the chief 

manifestation of human intelligence. Through language we express basic needs 

and lofty aspirations, technical know-how and flights of fantasy. Ideas are shared 

over great separations of distance and time.  The study of language is part of 

many disciplines outside of linguistics, including translation, literary criticism, 

philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Many less obvious disciplines 

investigate language use, such as law, hermeneutics, forensics, telephony, 

pedagogy, archaeology, cryptanalysis and speech pathology. Each applies distinct 

methodologies to gather observations, develop theories and test hypotheses. Yet 

all serve to deepen our understanding of language and of the intellect that is 

manifested in language. The importance of language to science and the arts is 

matched in significance by the cultural treasure embodied in language.      

 

No doubt, as Bird et al (2008) further point out, each of the world’s over 7,000 

human languages is rich in unique respects, in its oral histories and creation 

legends, down to its grammatical constructions and its very words and their 

nuances of meaning. Threatened remnant cultures have words to distinguish plant 

subspecies according to therapeutic uses that are unknown to science. Language is 

indispensable both in arts & humanities and in science and engineering as well. In 

arts and humanities, programming is carried out to manage language data, explore 

linguistic models, and test empirical claims; likewise, in science and engineering, 

language serves as a source of interesting problems in data modeling, data mining, 

and knowledge discovery. It is also important to note that as Anusuya and Katti 



 

 

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(2010) in distinguishing between human brain and the computer assert that 

Language is the key linkage which makes both brain and computer to work 

efficiently. 

 

Language is dynamic, as Bird et al (2008) note evolves over time as they come 

into contact with each other and they provide a unique window onto human pre-

history. Technological change gives rise to new words like blog and new 

morphemes like e- and cyber-.  For its breathtaking complexity and diversity, 

human language is as a colorful tapestry stretching through time and space. The 

next section will look at information technology and language technology. 

 

3.0 Information Technology and Language technology 

 

We shall first and foremost look at what information technology entails before 

delving into language technology. Information Computer Technology also called 

Information technology (IT) according to Urua (2004:5) involves the processing 

of information, the storage of such information, the distribution and assessment of 

such information with the use of the computer, modern technologies and digital 

devices. Information/data can be organized in a friendly way using computer. IT 

is the current research tool utilized in virtually all walks of life. Its resources 

include; internet and World Wide Web (WWW). The internet is a flexible 

computer-based global system with many interconnected computer networks, 

linking thousands of computers to enable them share information. The web 

consists of programs running on many computers and permits a user to find and 

display multimedia (multimodal) and documents (documents with a combination 

of text, photographs, graphics, audio and video). Similarly, Emeka-Nwobia 

(2008) also explains ICT and IT differently. According to him, whereas ICT 

involves the storage, management, exchange, transmission, manipulation, 

retrieval and assessing of information in its various forms through technological 

device. These devices may be computers, telephones, networks, electronic 

databases, CD ROMs, laser discs, video cameras, or fax machines; on the other 

hand, IT refers to the applications of technology to the acquisition, storage, 

organization, manipulation, assessing, referring and dissemination of information. 

 

On the other hand, according to Rashel (2011) Language technology which is 

sometimes referred to as human language technology includes: computational 

methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for 

analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. She further explains that 



 

 

Posthumous festschrift in honour of late professor R.O. Ezeuko, edited by Dr. Odinye, Egenti & Orji 

 

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these systems must be based on few knowledge of human language. Similarly, 

Uszkoreit (1997) defines information technologies as specialized for dealing with 

the most complex information medium in our world: human language. Therefore, 

these technologies are also often subsumed under the term Human Language 

Technology. Human language occurs in spoken and written form. Whereas speech 

is the oldest and most natural mode of language communication, complex 

information and most of human knowledge is maintained and transmitted in 

written texts. Speech and text technologies process or produce language in these 

two modes of realization. But language also has aspects that are shared between 

speech and text such as dictionaries, most of grammar and the meaning of 

sentences. Thus, large parts of language technology cannot be subsumed under 

speech and text technologies. Among those are technologies that link language to 

knowledge.  

 

Furthermore, language technologies can also help people communicate with each 

other. Much older than communication problems between human beings and 

machines are those between people with different mother tongues. One of the 

original aims of language technology has always been fully automatic translation 

between human languages. One of the major goals as Rashel (2011) points out is 

to simplify and improve the communication system between people and 

computer. From bitter experience scientists have realized that they are still far 

away from achieving the ambitious goal of translating unrestricted texts. 

Nevertheless, they have been able to create software systems that simplify the 

work of human translators and clearly improve their productivity. Less than 

perfect automatic translations can also be of great help to information seekers who 

have to search through large amounts of texts in foreign languages.  

 

According to Uszkoreit (1997) in our communication we mix language with other 

modes of communication and other information media. We combine speech with 

gesture and facial expressions. Digital texts are combined with pictures and 

sounds. Movies may contain language and spoken and written form. Thus speech 

and text technologies overlap and interact with many other technologies that 

facilitate processing of multimodal communication and multimedia documents. 

Nevertheless, Uszkoreit also points out that language is the fabric of the web, 

according to him, the rapid growth of the internet/www and the emergence of the 

information society poses exciting new challenges to language technology. 

However, he asserts that although, the new media combine text, graphics, sound 



 

 

Posthumous festschrift in honour of late professor R.O. Ezeuko, edited by Dr. Odinye, Egenti & Orji 

 

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and movies, the whole world of multimedia information can only be structured, 

indexed and navigated through language. 

 

 

3.1 The Relation between Language and Information Technology 

 

Computational Linguistics is largely an applied field, concerned with practical 

problems. There are as many applications as there are reasons for computers to 

process or produce language: for example, in situations where humans are 

unavailable, too expensive, too slow, or busy doing tasks that humans are better at 

than machines.  

 

Some current application areas include translating texts, especially business and 

technical texts from one language to another (Machine Translation), finding 

relevant documents in large collections of text (Information Retrieval), and 

answering questions about a subject area (expert systems with natural language 

interfaces).  

 

The most relevant language technologies are summarized by Uszkoreit (1997) 

below:  

 

 Speech recognition 

Spoken language is recognized and transformed in into text as in dictation 

systems, into commands as in robot control systems, or into some other internal 

representation.  

 

 Speech synthesis 

Utterances in spoken language are produced from text (text-to-speech systems) or 

from internal representations of words or sentences (concept-to-speech systems). 

Similarily, Urua (2004), explains that speech synthesis enable the computers to 

scan printed text and speak the words aloud. This tool is useful for the blind and 

visually challenged people.  

 

 Text categorization 

This technology assigns texts to categories. Texts may belong to more than one 

category, categories may contain other categories. Filtering is a special case of 

categorization with just two categories.  

 



 

 

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 Text Summarization 

The most relevant portions of a text are extracted as a summary. The task depends 

on the needed lengths of the summaries. Summarization is harder if the summary 

has to be specific to a certain query.  

 

 Text Indexing 
As a precondition for document retrieval, texts are stored in an indexed database. 

Usually a text is indexed for all word forms or – after lemmatization – for all 

lemmas. Sometimes indexing is combined with categorization and summarization. 

  

 Text Retrieval 
Texts are retrieved from a database that best match a given query or document. 

The candidate documents are ordered with respect to their expected relevance. 

Indexing, categorization, summarization and retrieval are often subsumed under 

the term information retrieval. 

 

 Information Extraction 

Relevant information pieces of information are discovered and marked for 

extraction. The meaning of the texts is analyzed in detail, answering specific 

questions about text content. The extracted pieces can be: the topic, named 

entities such as company, place or person names, simple relations such as prices, 

destinations, functions etc. or complex relations describing accidents, company 

mergers or football matches. Other kinds of text such as medical case histories 

that are in well-bounded domain systems will extract information and put it into 

databases for statistical analyses. 

 

 Data Fusion and Text Data Mining 
Extracted pieces of information from several sources are combined in one 

database. Previously undetected relationships may be discovered 

 

 

3.2  Computers in Specific Areas of Linguistics and Resources of IT 

 

Rogers (1998) highlights core areas of linguistics in which computers are used for 

linguistic analysis. 

 

 

 



 

 

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Phonetics and Phonology  

 

Computers helps to improve the way phonetics is taught but to be able to do it 

with the computer, the sounds of a particular language must be digitized which 

can be fed into any computer for linguistic analysis. There is also some available 

software like audacity software where these sounds can be edited to remove 

background noise. 

 

Rogers also notes that phonemic transcription can be taught using a computer by 

application of the appropriate software. Also, computer offers the opportunities 

for teaching anatomy needed in phonetics. The computer provides not only the 

access to the data, but also the tools for the analysis. CD-ROMs are used in 

storing large amounts of data. Programs used for phonetics and phonology among 

others include; PRAAT, E-LAN, CAPTAC, Phthong etc.  

 

Morphology 

 

The computer can be used to perform tasks such as dividing a word into 

morphemes, listing other allomorphs, identifying port-manteau morphs. It can 

also give the total of words in a given text etc. 

 

Syntax 

 

Tree diagram for sentences can be easily drawn by using a program that could 

parse strings. The computer can also convert labeled bracketed strings into trees. 

E.g SYNTACTICA 

 

Semantics 

 

The computer helps to make fine distinctions of meaning. Program such as 

Tarski’s World used in teaching logic can be useful in this regard. Others include 

SEMANTICA, FrameBuilder (allows creation of lexical database with semantic 

definitions). ELLOGON, AntCONC are concordance tools used to show the 

keyword-in-context concordance on the basis of frequency, length of word, 

inclusion in a list, or pattern matching. That is to say different semantic analysis 

can be performed using them, also the collocations patterns of words and the 

different meanings words can have in the different occurrences can be analyzed 

using these software. 



 

 

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Sociolinguistics 

 

Although, combination of some of the above listed software can be used for 

sociolinguistic analysis. For instance, the E-LAN or PRAAT can be used for 

annotation of the data. Language variations, innovations and isoglosses in a 

language can be captured using GAPMAP and other software showing these 

variations and different dialects on the map.  

 

 

Language teaching and learning 

 

ICT is learner’s friendly. Learners can assess information through the internet 

with little or no teacher’s guidance. Today, we have on-line education program 

called e-learning whereby people enroll for any degree programme. Academic 

materials can also be accessed in libraries of universities in the world. The virtual 

library provides this service and grant researchers access to books, journals, 

magazines, course curricula, university programmes, e.t.c. 

 

Other areas such as Psycholinguistics, language documentation etc. are also 

applied to computational method in the analysis of data. A lot of languages have 

been described and preserved computationally using IT resources. IT such as 

Shoebox and Microsoft Excel and Access can also be used for building database 

for dictionary making thereby building large corpora for a particular language.  

 

3.3 Some Software for linguistic analysis 

 

There are lots of software that is relevant for different aspects of research in 

linguistics. They can also be combined in the different stages of data analysis. For 

instance, AUDACITY is used for recording and processing recordings. 

ELAN/PRAAT is used for transcription/annotation. PRAAT is used for 

acoustic/auditory analysis and for generating output; it is basically used by 

linguists for speech analysis, NOTEPAD++ is used for preparing scripts and 

formatting data tables. While EXCEL is used for quick or basic plots, spot checks, 

data manipulation etc.; R is used for statistics and advanced plots. 

ELLOGON/ANTCONC is used for key word-in-context or concordances, etc.  

The following Software is also used for dialect analysis in sociolinguistics and 

especially for dialect variations studies. It includes: 



 

 

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Lo4:http://www.let.rug.nl/kleiweg/Lo4/ 

Gabmap: http://www.gabmap.nl 

VDM (Visual Dialectometry): www.dialectometry.com 

LingPy: http://lingPY.org.  This website used for historical linguistic studies. 

Most of the above software are free online and they can be easily downloaded for 

use for different linguistic analysis. 

 

 

4. Summary and Conclusion 

 

The foregoing no doubt presents IT resources as an indispensable tool that helps 

in solving language problems. Today, it is possible to manage very large corpora 

using the CD ROMs, MP3, FLASH DRIVE etc. Data can be accessed easily in 

the internet. The different software used in collection of text, annotation and 

plotting of graphs such as E-LAN, AUDACITY, Ant-CONC, R-Brul, PRAAT 

e.t.c. are all found in the internet using the Google search engine. Most of these 

software are free online software and can be downloaded alongside their tutorials 

which are also available online. Using IT for linguistic analysis or for academic 

purposes not only saves time, it makes work a lot easier and more fun. Following 

Anusuya and Katti (2010) this study also notes that “…language is the key 

linkage which makes both brain and computer to work efficiently”. 

 

 

http://www.gabmap.nl/
http://www.dialectometry.com/
http://lingpy.org/


 

 

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References 

 

Anusuya M.A. & S. K. Katti .2010. Superficial Analysis and Differences between 

the Human Brain and the Computer. International Journal of Computer 

science and Network Security, vol. 10 N0 7. 

 

Emeka-Nwobia Ngozi. 2008. Information and communication technology (ICT) 

in Mbah and Mbah (Ed.), History of Linguistics and Communication, a 

festschrift in honor of Professor P.A. Nwachukwu. Nsukka-Enugu: 

Paschal Communication, pp. 358-369. 

 

Bird S. E. Klein & Loper E. 2008. Introduction to Natural language processing. 

Retrieved from http://nltk.org/book/ 

 

Rashel M. 2011. Introducing Language Technology and Computational 

Linguistics in Bangladesh. International Journal of English Linguistics. 

Vol. 1, No. 1. www.ccsenet.org/ijel. 

 

Rogers Henry. 2008. Education in Using Computers in Linguistics: a practical 

guide in John Lawler and Helen Aristar Dry (Ed.). London and New York: 

Routledge. 

 

Uszkoreit H. 1997. Language Technology – A first Overview in Survey of the 

state of the art in Human language technology by Ronald A-Cole, Joseph 

Mariam, Uszkoreit Hans, Zaenen Annie and Zue Victor (Ed.). Retrieved 

from http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/LT.pdf. on 15/2/15. 

 

 

 

 

http://nltk.org/book/
http://www.ccsenet.org/ijel
http://www.dfki.de/~hansu/LT.pdf

