Semiotics is the study of the properties and semantics of signs and sign systems in human society. The most important object of semiotic research is natural language, the most main problem is the representation and recognition (interpretation) of the meaning of linguistic expressions.
Applied semiotics is an interdisciplinary field of semiotics that develops within the paradigm of artificial intelligence. It is aimed at research and development of models for specialized sign systems in computer applications.
The main applications of applied semiotics ideas, models and methods are:
- Human-computer natural language interfaces;
- Knowledge bases operating with concepts close to natural language (semiotic knowledge bases);
- Computer-aided design of complex objects, for which it is fundamentally difficult to derive a formal description;
- Management of complex objects, for which it is fundamentally difficult to derive formal models of functioning and management (intelligent control).
The use of applied semiotics can bring particularly tangible practical results in such areas of activity (economics, politics, social sphere, defense, complex systems design, etc.), where modeling is usually carried out in a dynamic environment under conditions of incomplete and often contradictory information.
The Tatarstan Academy of Sciences Institute of Applied Semiotics works in the scientific field called “Semiotic modeling in humanitites”, which is connected with fundamental and applied research for the following classes of problems:
- Linguistic models in intelligent computer technology. Research and applied development of linguistic models of Russian and Tatar languages in intellectual humanitarian and educational applications.
- Machine translation. Research and development of machine translation systems for Turkic languages based on the idea of linguistic structures parallelism on morphological and syntactic levels. Development of a Russian-Tatar translation system based on statistical and neural network models.
- Corpus research. Development of the electronic corpus of Tatar language for humanitarian and educational applications. The language corpus provides the richest foundation for development of linguistic models and serves as a resource for machine translation, speech technology, semiotic and cognitive studies.
- Speech technologies. Research and development of systems for Tatar speech analysis and synthesis.
- Ontological modeling. Development of ontologies and thesauri for intelligent systems on various subject areas.
- Designing of digital textbooks and learning systems. Studies of semiotic models for development of applied intellectual systems in education.