Hello everyone! My name is Evgeny
Chukharev-Hudilainen, and I am an associate professor in the applied linguistics
and technology program at Iowa State University. My background is in both computer science and
linguistics. When I studied computer science, my focus was on different approaches to artificial
intelligence: rule-based, statistical, and neural. In my linguistics research, I actually focus
on psycholinguistics, which is the intersection between linguistics and cognitive psychology
.
Specifically, I use computers to study how people acquire, understand, and produce natural language.
My research is currently organized into two strands. The first strand deals with behavioral
measures of text production. I use combined keystroke logging and eye-tracking techniques to
measure when and where writers pause during their text production, what they attend to while they
pause, and what that means for our understanding of the basic cognitive processes that underlie
text producti
on. From the applied standpoint, this strand of research helps me create technological
tools that support writers as they learn how to compose text, both in their first language,
and in their second or additional language. The second strand of my research focuses on
designing and evaluating computational models of the language learner and the test taker. I
use these models to create adaptive language learning applications, as well as novel types of
computer-delivered tasks for language asse
ssment. You have already heard from my former and
current PhD students about the kinds of work that I currently do in my research
lab that is related to biometric writing technology and spoken dialog systems
for language learning and assessment. I will instead focus on a bit more distant future
of language learning and teaching technologies. In the relatively near future, I am envisioning
that language teaching might actually start to play a somewhat less important role in the society
beca
use computers will be able to translate, accurately and quickly, both text and
speech from one language into another. Machine translation has existed since the middle
of the 20th century, but the quality of machine translation has historically been relatively low
and inadequate for many practical applications. However, with the advent of large computational
models of language that take advantage of the deep-learning approach to artificial
intelligence, computers can now translate texts and
speech very accurately and reliably.
In the future, I can envision a society where people use wearable or implantable computing
devices to obtain translations, as needed, from any language in which the content may be
available into the user’s preferred language. In even more distant future, I believe that
a time may come when people might not need to use language for communication at all. Instead,
interfaces may be built to directly connect human brains to computers, and to other people’s b
rains.
Through these neural interfaces, information will be transmitted much faster and much more reliably
than through language use. I cannot predict when or if this will be actually possible, but
very exciting research is being done in this direction and we might be surprised by the speed
at which these neural interfaces become available.
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