The definitions of Human Language Technologies which can be found on the Net are numerous. I have chosen one by Wikipedia, that refers to the term as Natural language processing (NLP) and says:

‘It is a subfield of artificial intelligence and linguistics. It studies the problems of automated generation and understanding of natural human languages. Natural language generation systems convert information from computer databases into normal-sounding human language, and natural language understanding systems convert samples of human language into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate’.

and another one by Hans Uszkoreit, out of his study in 2007 called ‘What is Language Technology?‘. Uszkoreit defines the term as:

‘Language technology — sometimes also referred to as human language technology — comprises computational methods, computer programs and electronic devices that are specialized for analyzing, producing or modifying texts and speech. These systems must be based on some knowledge of human language. Therefore language technology defines the engineering branch of computational linguistics’.

Uszkoreit studied Linguistics and Computer Science at the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Texas at Austin. During this time in Austin he also worked as an research associate in a large translation project at the Linguistics Research Center. In 1998 Uszkoreit was a appointed to a newly created chair of Computational Linguistics at Saarland University and started at the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics. Uszkoreit is permanent member of the International Comittee of Computational Linguistics (ICCL, member of the European Academy of Sciences, Past President of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information, member of the Executive Board of the European Network of Language and Speech.

Nowadays, he is a professor of Computational Linguistics at the Department of Computational Linguistics and Phonetics of Saarland University at Saarbrücken, at the same time he serves as Scientific Director at the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) where he leads the DFKI Language Technology Laboratory.By cooptation, he is also Professor of the Computer Science Department.

Among his most relevant projects and publications, we can quote:

• Uszkoreit, H. (1999) ‘Hauptartikel Grammatikmodelle , sowie mehrere Lang-und Kurzartikel zum Themenbereich Grammatiktheorie’ . In G. Strube (Ed.) Wörterbuch der Kognitionswissenschaft. Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1996.
• Uszkoreit, H. (1997) ‘Overview: Formal Tools and Methods’. In R.A Cole et al. (Eds.), Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, Cambridge University Press and Giardini.

• Uszkoreit, H. (2007) ‘Methods and Applications for Relation Detention’. In: Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing 2007.

Some of the European Research centres for Human Language Technologies are the following:

• National Centre for Language Technology (NCLT) : Located in Dublin,the centre “carries out basic researchs and develops applications’.
• OFAI Language Technology Group: An Australian center that ‘conduct research in modelling and processing human languages, especially for German’.
• Edimburgh Language Technology Group (LTG) : The LTG has been working since the early 1990s and they focus on ‘building practical solutions to real problems in text processing’.
• Language Technology Documentation Centre in Finland: This centre has been developing ‘in order to make speech-to-speech translation real’.

Sources:

• http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~hansu/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natural_language_processing&oldid=110067975
• http://www.dfki.de/lt/lt-general.php
• http://www.nclt.dcu.ie/
• http://www.ofai.at/research/nlu/
• http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/
• http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/filt/projects/index-en.shtml