CENTRE FOR TEXT TECHNOLOGY (CTexT®)

Newsflash!

Good news for South African languages!

Worldwide, people are increasingly gaining access to electronic devices in a growing variety of languages. South Africans can already use ATMs and spelling checkers in their mother tongues. For developments like these, language technology data and resources (such as electronic texts and word lists) are needed. The more data there is, the smarter the tool or machine will be, facilitating human-machine interaction through a particular language.

For this reason, the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) has established the National Centre for HLT (Human Language Technology) to develop reusable text and speech resources, and the Resource Management Agency (RMA) to manage and distribute these from one central point. The Centre for Text Technology (CTexT®) at the North-West University has been appointed to set up the RMA over the next three years. (Read more)
 

Quick links

Afrikaanse SkryfGoed 2011	Autshumato
Interactive Vowel Chart
Prof. Daan Wissing (Senior Researcher and expert in the field of phonetics and phonology) and Wikus Pienaar of CTexT recently developed an interactive vowel chart. Click on the above screenshot to view the vowel chart.

About Us

On 1 June 2004 the Centre for Text Technology(CTexT®) started functioning as a non-profit, self-supporting unit of the Research Focus Area: Languages and Literature in the South African Context in the Faculty of Arts at the North-West University (Potchefstroom Campus).

The staff at CTexT occupy themselves with a variety of research and development activities. A close interaction between such research and development activities is aspired towards. Research should, wherever possible, lead/contribute to product development, whereas all products are rooted in thorough research.

The four main activities of CTexT involve the following:

• Research (including basic research, strategic research, applied research, and market research)
• Development (including development of sources and end-user applications & products)
• Commercialisation of products and services
• Maintenance of products and support to end users/clients

Given the field of HLT and Computational Linguistics in South Africa, CTexT has three specific focal points:

• Resource-scarce languages (with specific focus on South African Languages);
• Proofing Tools, Computer-Assisted Language Learning Software, Machine Translation, and HLT Data; and
• Novel Approaches to Natural Language Processing.