Linguistics has always been known for its traditional uses in learning, preserving and understanding languages, but it is also a driving force for areas like technology.

As companies seek to have faster, better responses in their artificial intelligence (AI) products and customer service, linguists become critical in analyzing and understanding people’s particular speeches and words. With thousands of unique languages in the world, linguistics provides stronger understanding and solutions for things like speech recognition, speech synthesis, automatic translation and machine understanding.

Focusing on languages like Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Hidatsa, Armenian and more, presenters from across the nation and around the world will coalesce at Fresno State for the international Western Conference on Linguistics. The three-day conference, hosted by the Department of Linguistics, will be from Nov. 15 to 17 at the University Business Center in the Peters Business building.

Plenary talks will be from 9 to 10 a.m. each day in the Peters Business building (Room 191) and will include Dr. Arto Anttila from Stanford University on Nov. 15; Will Lewis from Microsoft on Nov. 16; and Dr. Geoff Gamble, a Fresno State alumnus who served as president of Montana State University from 2000-09, on Nov. 17.

Visit Fresno State News to read more about the conference.