Irion's TwentyOne system is based on one of the world's most exciting technologies: language technology.

Language technology deals with the most complex information medium there is: the human language. Language technology is also called human language technology, or (to distinguish it from artificial languages) natural language technology.

Human language occurs in spoken and written form, and so language technology has two modes: speech and text technology. There is also a third, shared area, which includes study of dictionaries, grammar and the meaning of sentences. This shared area is the heart of language technology: knowledge technology. Knowledge technology links language to knowledge. Although we do not know how language, knowledge and thought are represented in the human brain, language technology has created formal representation systems that link words to concepts in our minds and also to tasks in the real world. These representation systems underpin all language applications, including Irion's TwentyOne system.

The language technology of TwentyOne was originally researched by TNO in cooperation with several universities (Carnegie Mellon, Twente, Tübingen) and research companies (Xerox XRCE Grenoble, DFKI Saarbrücken), and its development was completed by Irion. TwentyOne combines language technology with advanced statistical techniques.

Today there are exciting opportunities for the application of natural language technology, especially in the fields of computers, human interaction, e-commerce and the Internet.

• Computers
  The biggest problem with modern computers is communication; they do not understand our language. Computer languages are difficult to learn and do not correspond to the structure of human thought. Language technology can be used to increase greatly the interaction between human beings and computers. It can make software more acceptable, and make its users more productive. Language technology transforms the machine into a partner that can listen and speak.
• Human communication
  Language technologies can also help people communicate with each other. Long before human beings confronted the problem of communicating with computers, people with different mother tongues were finding it hard to understand each other. An important use for language technology has always been to develop fully automatic translation between human languages. Although the achievement of this is still far away, there are already software systems that can simplify the work of human translators and improve their productivity. These less-than-perfect automatic translation systems are also very useful for information seekers who have to search through large amounts of texts in foreign languages.
• E-commerce
  Any business that successfully uses e-commerce will struggle to cope with the enormous volume of communication with its customers. Language technology can help to sort, filter and route incoming email. It can help the customer relationship agent to find relevant information and compose a response to a customer query. When a customer asks a question that another customer has already asked, and had answered, language technology can find the appropriate earlier reply and use it to respond to the customer automatically.
• Internet
  The rapid growth of the Internet (270,000 new users online every day) and the emergence of the information society pose exciting new challenges for language technology. Information on the Internet, whether it consists of text, graphics, sound or movies, can only be organised, indexed and navigated using language. Before we can successfully browse, navigate, filter and process the information available on the web, we need software that can analyse and manage the contents of documents. When we use language technology for content management we can turn this wealth of digital information into collective knowledge. The increasing multilinguality of the web poses an additional challenge for language technology. New systems for crosslingual information and knowledge management are already being developed, to surmount language barriers to e-commerce, education and international cooperation. TwentyOne is such a system.

• Opzijnbest.nl