Suchergebnisse

FLaReNet - Fostering Language Resources Network - is an EC eContentPlus Thematic Network (ECP-2007-LANG-617001) whose aim is to create a shared policy and to foster a European strategy in the field of Language Resources (LRs) and Language Technologies (LTs). The growth of the field in the last years should be complemented by a common reflection and by an effort that identifies synergies and overcomes fragmentation. The consolidation of the area is a pre-condition to enhance competitiveness at EU level and worldwide. By creating consensus among major players in the field, the mission of FLaReNet is to identify priorities as well as short, medium, and long-term strategic objectives, sustain international cooperation and provide consensual recommendations in the form of a plan of action for EC, national organisations and industry.

International cooperation and re-creation of a community are the most important drivers for a coherent evolution of the Language Resource (LR) area in the next years. FLaReNet has been a European forum to facilitate interaction among LR stakeholders and its structure took into account the fact that LRs present various dimensions and must be approached from many perspectives: technical, but also organisational, economic, legal, political. The Network addressed also multicultural and multilingual aspects, essential when facing access and use of digital content in today's Europe. FLaReNet consolidated existing knowledge, presenting it analytically and visibly, and contributed to structuring the area of LRs of the future by discussing new strategies to: convert existing and experimental technologies related to LRs into useful economic and societal benefits; integrate so far partial solutions into broader infrastructures; consolidate areas mature enough for recommendation of best practices; anticipate the needs of new types of LRs. The outcomes of FLaReNet has been of a directive nature, to help identify those priority areas of LRs of major interest for the public that need public funding to develop or improve. A blueprint of actions has constituted the input to policy development both at EU and national level for identifying new language policies that support linguistic diversity in Europe, in combination with strengthening the language product market, e.g. for new products and innovative services, especially for less technologically advanced languages.

Despite the complexity of handling its languages, the European Union has established that cultural and language differences are a unique asset to be preserved. Europe needs to find means - such as technological ones - to overcome the language barriers to support citizens and industry in a multilingual globalised world. The large majority of industrial technological applications that handle natural language, i.e. Machine Translation, Crosslingual Information Retrieval, Multilingual Information Extraction, Automatic Document Indexing, Question Answering, Natural Language Interfaces, etc., include Language Resources as critical components. Although Language Technologies may consist of language independent engines, they depend on the availability of language-dependent knowledge under the form of Language Resources for their real-life implementation. At the same time, it is proved that a critical mass of Language Resources can make advancement in research and technology development possible and quicker, making Europe the leader of the market related to multilingualism. Companies such as Google or Microsoft play a dominant role in this framework, as they have access to a huge amount of data in many different languages, devote considerable resources to Language Technologies, have massive computing power and a direct research-to-application pipeline using a new business model based on so-called "free" services. The fact that a US company like Google is delivering some of the most comprehensive Language Technology solutions to support multilingualism should raise concern among EU officials.

Developments in the Dutch language during the 17th century, part of the Early Modern period, form an active research topic in historical linguistics and literature. To enable automatic quantitative analysis, a corpus of letters by the 17th century Dutch author and politician P.C. Hooft is manually annotated with parts-of-speech, document segmentation and sociolinguistic metadata. The corpus is developed as part of the Nederlab online research portal, which is available through the CLARIN ERIC European research infrastructure. This paper discusses the design and evaluation of the annotation effort, as well as adding new annotations to an existing annotated corpus.

This article provides an overview of the dissemination work carried out in META-NET from 2010 until 2015; we describe its impact on the regional, national and international level, mainly with regard to politics and the funding situation for LT topics. The article documents the initiative's work throughout Europe in order to boost progress and innovation in our field. ; Peer reviewed