Introduction to BLaRKs Helmer Strik Dept. of Linguistics Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST) Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands Radboud University Nijmegen

Cape Town, Introduction: Background BLaRK: Basic Language Resources Kit NTU: define the BLaRK for Dutch (more details in next presentation) How to define the Basic Language Resources for a language for a given context? Basic Language Resources for Dutch, in general Basic Language Resources for Dutch, handicapped Basic Language Resources for SA Also for many other languages

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, BLaRK: Basic Language Resources Kit Components: Data: sets of language data and descriptions in machine readable form Modules (or semi-products): the basic software components of HLT applications Applications: classes of applications rather than specific applications or products 2 matrices: 1.Modules x Data 2.Applications x Modules  BLaRK

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, DataApplications Modules LanguageTechnology SpeechTechnology Quantify: 0, 1, or 2 (+’s) Field survey & Expert opinions

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, BLaRK Language technology Modules Robust modular text preprocessing Morphological analysis and morphosyntactic disambiguation Robust syntactic analysis Aspects of semantic analysis (word meaning and reference) Data Monolingual lexicon Annotated corpus of written Dutch Benchmarks for evaluation

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, BLaRK Speech technology Modules Automatic speech recognition Speech synthesis system Tools for annotation of speech corpora Confidence measures and utterance verification Identification (speaker, language, dialect) Data Monolingual speech corpora for specific applications Multilingual speech corpora Multimodal/medial speech corpora Benchmarks for evaluation

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, From BLaRK to priority lists 1.BLaRK: Basic Language Resources Kit 2.Inventory & Evaluation 3.Priority lists BLaRKinventory priority

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Inventory & Evaluation Inventory: Which components in BLaRK are available? Bought Freely obtainable Reusable Of sufficient quality Evaluation: And of sufficient quality? Checklist approach or formal evaluation

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Availability Quantify:1-10 Field survey & Expert opinions Modules Data

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Priority lists The prioritisation was based on the following requirements: The components should currently be unavailable, inaccessible, or of insufficient quality. The components should be relevant for a large number of applications. Developing the components should be possible in the short term.

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Consensus, broad support Report version 1 Feedback Academia & industry Sent to the Dutch-Flemish HLT field (1000 sites) Workshop 15/11/2001  Report version 2, final version

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, From BLaRK to priority lists 1.BLaRK 2.Inventory & Eval. 3.Priority lists Report 1 Feedback: HLT FieldHLT Field WorkshopWorkshop 1.BLaRK 2.Inventory & Eval. 3.Priority lists Report 2

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Introduction: Background BLaRK: Basic Language Resources Kit How to define the Basic Language Resources for a language for a given context? Basic Language Resources for Dutch, in general Basic Language Resources for Dutch, handicapped Basic Language Resources for SA Also for many other languages

Radboud University Nijmegen Cape Town, Questions?