A spin-off from artificial intelligence, language technology could become a stage to showcase Australian IT talent in mobile, wireless and speech applications.
A university course is hoped to foster the development of language technology skills, ensuring that the nation will have qualified staff for further research and development.
While there are only a handful of organisations working with language technology in Australia, most personnel have been recruited off-shore, including six out of eight language technology staff members at the nation's premier research body CSIRO.
"There aren't a lot of people in Australia that are qualified to work in this area, companies cannot find people with prerequisite skills, so they employ people from overseas," Associate Professor, Department of Computing at Macquarie University said.
Macquarie University in Sydney has come up with a set of courses within the computer science degree to provide companies with skilled graduates to further develop the computational processing of human language.
Language technology is the way in which users and computers interact "intelligently", either through the use of text-based applications to search more effectively for information on the Internet or through voice recognition to interact with devices or appliances.
According to Dale some companies in Australia are interested in text-based systems, but the majority are concentrating on improving spoken language dialogue systems, which will improve the interaction between the user and devices.
Dale told ZDNet Australia that the market for both text and speech based systems is very big in the United States and Europe, however Australia is a couple of years behind.
"There will be a lot of job opportunities for text in the future," Dale said.
Speaking to ZDNet Australia, Research Group Leader at the CSIRO Intelligent Interactive Technologies, Dr Cecile Paris said, "it will be nice to have local industry and locally trained people. It is good for Australia not to be dependent on hiring people from overseas."
There are a handful of companies in Australia that are interested in developing language systems such as CSIRO, Motorola, Philips, Sun Microsystems and Syrinx, which have also provided funding to the university for the implementation of the courses, and Dale believes that the support is on the increase.
"I expect graduates will initially go overseas to get jobs, however in the long term those opportunities will appear here," Dale said.
