PREVIOUS EVENTS Panel on International Co-operation (LREC - Granada) Panel of the Funding Agencies (LREC - Granada) Post-LREC Workshop on “Multilingual Information Management: Current Levels and Future Abilities (Closing Session - Granada)

International Conference on “New Vistas in Transatlantic Scientific and Technical Cooperation” (Washington DC - June ‘98) HLT Session LREC (Athens) Panel on International Cooperation COLING (Saarbruecken) Panel on International Cooperation

INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION In previous discussions (Granada, Washington, 1998; Athens, 2000) the following areas of HLT have emerged as being in urgent need of international co- operation: –standards (de facto, best practices); –Language Resources (LR); –evaluation; –core technologies; –selected vertical domains.

LR are a central infrastructural component and a central issue for international coordination LR are essential components of HLT activity, supporting research, system development and training, and evaluation in both the mono- and multilingual context; Political/cultural aspects of LR: “endangered languages”; A key enabling condition of integration of different technologies and languages requires that LR are shared among different sectors and applications; The richness of the multilingual capabilities associated with a language depends on the number of languages for which adequate LR exist;

The high cost and effort of the production of LR should be shared, in order to make them more affordable. The creation of multilingual LR requires agreement on a coordination policy, to ensure the reuse of existing monolingual resources and to facilitate access to native speakers of the various languages.

MULTILINGUAL LR In particular, the production of multilingual LR poses: research issue and challenges; organisational problems:  who has the responsability of promoting - and how - the co- operation of R&D communities speaking different languages?

Different situation for: types of LR: corpora, lexicons, etc.; large/general multilingual LR; applications specific LR; customisation; different types of information (data VS analitical/interpretative features).

- for different phases of LR development (research standards; specifications;construction;maintenance; acquisition; (pre)tuning; customization; updating;technology transfer; etc.) DIFFERENT strategies in various continents ROLES/RESPONSABILITIES of various actors CHALLENGES

MODALITIES  “Structured” international co- operation (For ex.: US-EU Transatlantic agreement: current/past initiatives, lessons to be learned, perspectives for the future, perspectives/opportunities)

 Other forms of international co-operation:experiences; advantages/disadvantages/recovery measures/consequences; suggestions for the short/medium/long term. ETC.

 Why international co-operation is more “difficult” than in other sciences and needs institutional support?  What are the consequences of the links with social goals, national identities and commercial interests which characterize HLT?  In which areas is international co-operation necessary / appropriate / inappropriate?  Which activities need international co-operation (for instance, evaluation, multilingual LR etc.)?

 What can we learn from recent experiences of co- operation supported by the Funding Agencies in the frame of the “Transatlantic Scientific and Technical Co-operation Agreement”? What are the obstacles? Which strategies have been successful?  What kind of initiatives for co-operation with other countries (Asian, South-American etc.) can be taken and what their possibilities / benefits / priorities could be?

European Language Resource Association An Improved infrastructure for Data sharing Centralized Non-for-profit organization for the collection, distribution, and validation of speech, text, and terminology resources and tools,  A Repository Center:  Technical & Logistic issues  Commercial issues (prices, fees, royalties)  Legal issues (Licensing, IPR)  Information Dissemination An Association of users of Language Resources An operational company: European Language Resource Distribution Agency (ELDA)

The Association Membership Drive:  ELRA is Open to European & Non-European Institutions  Resources are available to Members & Non-Members  Pay per Resource  Substantial discounts on LR prices (over 70%)  Legal and contractual assistance with respect to LR matters  Access to Validation and production manuals (Quality assessment)  Figures and facts about the Market (results of ELRA surveys)  Newsletter and other publications Some of the benefits of becoming a member:

ELRA CATALOGUE -- Identification of LRs

Legal Issues- Licensing Provider-User Agreements Providers User

Legal Issues- Licensing ELRA Providers Owners Distribution Agreement VAR END-users End-Users VAR Agreement End-User Agreement

DISTRIBUTION ACTIVITIES distributed resources Number of resources distributed to members & non-members Periods of 12 months

Other Technical ACTIVITIES  Market analysis & surveys  LR production, packaging & funding  Validation of resources - Validation networks  Language Resources for Evaluation purposes

Some aspects of LREC’2000 Connecting industrials with academic partners

Some facts on LREC’2000 Participants

Some facts on LREC’2000

International Standards for Language Engineering Project Participants EU  Consorzio Pisa Ricerche I CO  University of Southern Denmark DK CR  Université de Genève CH CRUSA  University of Pennsylvania – Computer and Information Sciences  University of Pennsylvania – Linguistic Data Consortium  New York University  Information Sciences Institute – University of Southern California

Objectives HLT standardsEU-US  To develop HLT standards within EU-US International Research Cooperation EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards)  To build on the successful EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group for Language Engineering Standards) innovative areas  To tackle innovative areas where standards are strongly and urgently required support HLT  To support HLT RTD and National projects, and HLT industry internationally active body for HLT standardisation  To promote EAGLES as an internationally active body for HLT standardisation contribute to all IST  To contribute to all IST thematic programmes

Organisation Work is organised in 3 EAGLES Working Groups 3 EAGLES Working Groups and several subgroups of experts several subgroups of experts, drawn from academia and industry, build consensus  to build consensus around international workshops ISLE standards and guidelines will be  validated  validated in RTD and National projects,  disseminated  disseminated widely, with exemplary data to yield maximum impact for minimum cost, and enhance user experience of the information society through standards-based HLT

Multilingual Computational Lexicons - CLWG lexical semantics  extend EAGLES work on lexical semantics, necessary to establish inter-language links standards for multilingual lexicons  design standards for multilingual lexicons prototype tool  develop a prototype tool to implement lexicon guidelines and standards sample lexicons tag exemplary corpora  create exemplary EAGLES conformant sample lexicons and tag exemplary corpora for validation purposes standardised evaluation procedures  develop standardised evaluation procedures for lexicons

Natural Interaction and Multimodality NIMM - WG rapidly innovating domain guidelines for A rapidly innovating domain urgently requiring early standardisation. ISLE will develop guidelines for: data resources  the creation of NIMM data resources  multilayer annotation of NIMM data  multilayer annotation of NIMM data, including spoken dialogue in NIMM contexts  meta-data descriptions multimodal resources  meta-data descriptions of multimodal resources annotation toolsmultimodal capability  a specification - and first implementation - of extension of annotation tools to multimodal capability

Evaluation of HLT Systems E - WG Evaluation methodology of HLT products and systems on ISO standards based on ISO standards case studies accompanied by practical case studies for Machine Translation systems  quality models for Machine Translation systems  maintenance  maintenance of previous guidelines - in an ISO based framework (ISO 9126, ISO 14598)

‘86 Grosseto Workshop LEX Projects (Acquilex) EuroWordNet Common Top Ontologies Common Basic Concepts ILI: Interlingual Index to English WordNet Italian, Spanish, Dutch, + WordNet Association announced in Athens (2nd LREC, June 2000) Speechdat, Speechdat-Car, Specon, Sala, etc.

PAROLE/SIMPLE A set of comparable corpora (20M words) and computational lexica (20K entries) Encoded at morpho, syntactic, semantic level according to common specifications compatible with EAGLES recommendations For all the EC languages Subsidiarity principle Initial harmonized nuclei (financially supported by the EC) to be enlarged to “real-life” size through national funds (already 7 national projects)

ENABLER European National Activities for Basic Language Engineering & Resources  Survey of existing national activities  Fostering common research and compatibility of LR  Suggestion for and contribution to international cooperation -- A new Initiative  Identification of existing resources (Universal Catalogue)  The Basics (e.g. Standards, tools, evaluation procedures, …)

INITIAL TOPICS for an INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION “STRUCTURE” in the FIELD OF LR  to identify LR available for different languages  to define a “minimal” set of “basic” LR to be promoted for as many languages as possible  to establish an international effort vs. the WIPO for promoting an adequate legislation for the provision of LR  to establish for written LR an initiative parallel to COCOSDA and an umbrella for the two initiatives

To set up truly international umbrella organization for LR To define: The form, nature,... To formulate: A complete workplan To identify: Possible affiliation/funding sources We will call a meeting in the framework of ELSNET LR Task Group + Enabler before the end of the year Taking into account the overview emerging from today’s survey