1. NLP Related Activities in Thailand Virach Sornlertlamvanich Information Research and Development Division National Electronics and Computer Technology Center Thailand 27 August 2002, AFNLP/COLING2002, Taipei, Taiwan

2. SNLP-O-COCOSDA 2002 Hua-Hin, Thailand May 9-11, 2002

3. ✔ About 100 participants ✔ Invited talks: 'Information Retrieval and Modeling of Tonal Features of Speech', Prof. H. Fujisaki, U. of Tokyo 'Speech Synthesis for Tonal Languages' Prof. Fangxin Chen, IBM China Lab. 'Natural Language Understanding and Action Control', Prof. Takenobu Tokunaga, TIT 'Cross-Language Projection of Linguistic Knowledge', Prof. David Yarowsky, John Hopkins U.

4. ✔ Presentations: 57 oral presentations  28 regular papers  17 short papers  8 COCOSDA papers  4 student papers ✔ Submission countries: 23 from Thailand 14 from Japan 5 from China 3 from Korea and India 2 from Taiwan 1 from Malaysia, Indonesia and Guam 4 student paers from Thailand

5. ✔ Types of papers: 11 papers in IR/IE 7 papers in pattern recognition 6 papers in NLP application 4 papers in language resources 3 papers in morphology 2 papers in syntax 13 papers in speech processing 8 papers in O-COCOSDA 4 papers in student session

6. ✔ SNLP 1993 Chulalongkorn U. and NECTEC 1995 Kasetsart U. and NECTEC 1997 AIT and NECTEC 2000 King Mongkut's U. Of Technology (Thonburi) and NECTEC 2002 Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology and NECTEC

7. Survey on Research and Development of Machine Translation in Asian Countries Merlin Beach Resort Phuket, Thailand May 13-14, 2002

8. Participation Participants: 11 Countries India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam : and 1 region Hong Kong Total participants: 50 (oversea 24, local 26) - R&D group (39) - Supporting, policy and planning group (11)

9. Objectives: 1) To update technology status of machine translation in Asia. 2) To exchange research and development experience in the field. 3) To establish collaboration for developing a cross language web navigation in Asia. 4) To establish activities for technology transfer from experienced countries to the inexperienced countries. 5) To develop human resources in the field.

10. Activities - Keynote speech: 'AAMT Activities and General Trends of MT' by Dr. Hitoshi Iida - 17 papers by participants * MT Research Techniques: spoken language translation, semantic annotation, research on particular cases * MT Research Status in the Countries * Digitalization Research and Infrastructure Status * Problems in R&D - Roundtable Discussion * Collaboration within Asia * Standardization for languages within this region * Financial support problem * Possibility of joining the existing working bodies

11. MT status in Asia Basic components:- Standardization (Character code and locale) Lao PDR, Myanmar, Philippines, Vietnam Working on Regional MT:- Philippines and India (official lang. - dialects) Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei (share resources for Malay-English MT development) Experience on English and mother language MT Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand.

12. MT in Thailand Computerization (1970-) Experience (1981-1996) Development and Service (1998-) Regional Collaboration (200?) Dev. & Service Collab. Computerization Experience 19701975198019851990199520002005

13. ParSit SMART TRANSLATOR 1.9 TRANSLATOR 1.5 AGENT DICT PLAETHAI Available MT in Thailand

14. ParSit Service Process ParSit Server - receive data from user - send data to MT server 2 User send URL/TEXT to ParSit server 1 ParSit Server - receive result from MT - send result to User 4 User receive Thai WP from server 5 MT Server (E-T) 3

15. Number of unique session/month

16. Expected Collaboration in Asia Establish Asian chapters for Intra-Asian Collaboration. Construct Help-desk operation for standardization. Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for Language resources. Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for MT. Make standardization among Asian languages Share language resources Exchange information for research & application

17. What should we do? Establish Asian chapters for Intra-Asian Collaboration in ISO; Language resource, code, document Install BBS and mailing group Provide tutorial programa and application projects Promote the contribution from each country

18. What should we do? Construct Help-desk operation for standardization Standardized documents/ activities (ISO.MPEG7) Code standardization (unicode, etc.)

19. Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for Language resources. What should we do? Coding description Basic descriptors and mechanisms for language resources Representation schemes Multilingual text representation Lexical databases Workflow of Language Resource Management

20. What should we do? Establish a Working group or Liaison Secretariat for MT Machine Translation (may be under AAMT) Language Processing (General/ Infrastructure) Verification for standardization Copyright Operation personnel/ fund cooperation

21. Three Levels of Collaboration Standardization Font, Character code, I/O method, Print, Locale Language Resources and Processing Tools Dictionary, Corpus, NLP generic tools Cross-Language R&D and Services Machine Translation, Search engine, Information Retrieval/Extraction

22. Cross Language Technology

23. Application over the Cross Language Tech. Cross Language Technology VisualizationPresentationExtractionRetrievalSummarizationMTMining E-services

24. Bridge the Digital Divide by Overcoming the Language Barrier with a Smart MT Solution virach@nectec.or.th http://www.links.nectec.or.th/virach